You're probably right, but I still got a soft spot for Nixon and splitting China and Russia was a good tactical move and I don't blame him for outsourcing our jobs to China, that was under Clinton.
It was in these times that William McKinley former Governor of Ohio, was elected the 25th President of the United States in 1896. He would fix these issues or at least make them better well enough to keep America a somewhat recognizable country and fought for fair play for and to better the lot of minorities, Catholics, Jews, and workers He was the last President of the Civil War generation to serve in the White House. During the war he had fought in the Union Army’s 23rd Ohio Infantry. During the Battle of Antietam, he earned praise for driving a wagon of hot rations to soldiers despite being under heavy fire from the enemy. By the time the war was over, he had risen from a private to a brevet major. He ran a famous and iconic “front porch campaign” for President. McKinley deserves to be remembered as more than the guy who Teddy Roosevelt took over from. First off, he fought over the issue of tariffs aggressively and returned us to the American system in a way that helped the working man while protecting private property which deflated fears of revolution. Our agricultural and resource extraction industries needed high tariffs to thrive like they did. Higher wages attracted the best, most skilled workers thus higher quality products will be made, they sell better and the employer makes a greater profit. He balanced the needs of labor and capital in a way the benefited them both.
He staved off a socialist revolution by maintaining a high standard of living for the American working man, by not being hostile to capital, placing limitations on wage-depressing Chinese economic migration, and by putting forward a positive vision of American excellence in the present and future. McKinley encouraged reconciliation between the North and South. He built monuments to the Southern dead, encouraged Southerners to volunteer in the Spanish-American War which they did in great numbers, and refused to wave “the bloody shirt” and denigrate the South to rile up his Republican base. He managed to largely bring the South back into the nation and heal the wounds left in the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
McKinley was a civil rights champion who took significant steps on behalf of black Americans. He was limited in what he could do by the political realities of the times, but he still did much. He appointed thirty African Americans to federal office which was nearly as many as had been appointed by all his predecessors combined. He publicly denounced lynching as a “scourge.” He worked with prominent African American leaders such as Congressmen George Henry White to address racial injustice. During the Spanish-American War, he ensured that black soldiers could serve and be recruited. He also acted to stiffen federal penalties for lynch mobs. McKinley was also a champion of the rights of Native Americans. He appointed Ethan Allan Hitchcock a friend of the Indian, as his Secretary of the Interior. He vigorously prosecuted land fraud and assisted Native peoples and protected their rights. McKinley himself signed four executive orders providing land for Native American schools. When a bill came to his desk to open up what was left of Navajo land to white exploitation. He vetoed it and ruled in favor of the tribe. He then sent a message to Congress saying how unfair the proposed bill was to the Navajo and that signing it would not be just. McKinley furthermore chastised the whites who were up to no good for not even bothering to get the Navajo’s permission and asked why no attempt have made to negotiate with them. He even praised the Navajo for their “habits of industry and husbandry.”
President McKinley also fought for religious tolerance and stood up for Catholics and Jews. He was in fact, the first President to appoint Catholics to federal positions. He was also the first sitting President to visit a Catholic summer school in 1899. A shift in the Catholic vote from William Jennings Bryan to him helped secure his victory in the Presidential election in 1896. Lastly, he appointed Irish Catholic Terrence Powderly as Commissioner-General of Immigration. McKinley appointed a young Jew named Jacob Hollander to be the first treasurer of Puerto Rico’s new government. He openly engaged with American Jewish leaders and attended the 1897 Washington Hebrew Congregation cornerstone laying. McKinley and the party leadership blocked efforts to restrict the immigration of Jews and Eastern and Southern Europeans to America.
President McKinley also preserved the stability of America. He refused to remonetize silver and devalue our currency. He bought himself time with tariffs and the discovery of the Rand mines in South Africa which loosened up monetary conditions without requiring us to abandon the all-important gold standard. Lastly, he would redirect settlement energy outwards. He did that with the Spanish-American War, the annexation of Hawaii, getting the ball rolling on the negotiations for the building of the Panama Canal, and all the resultant opportunities for adventure abroad. This opened the door for men of talent and agency like a young Herbert Hoover, to go on business adventures by means of joining up with the Rough Riders or enlisting in the Navy or Marine Corps. Our 25th President deserves much more recognition than he gets from the public and historians!
The twentieth century was indeed an absolute disaster for the United States and the western world. The two World Wars badly damaged the West. The Cold War led to an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union that almost led to the destruction of the planet and all life on Earth. The power of the government has only grown more and more since the early twentieth century. Woodrow Wilson created the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission and the War Industries Board and signed into the law the Espionage and Sedition Acts. The former made criticism of the first world war illegal and locked up 1,000 Americans for doing so. The latter shut down, censored and monitored newspaper publications. FDR seized private property, conducted illegal wiretaps, tried to silence domestic opposition, and interned 110,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. The New Deal led to price fixing, court packing, regressive taxes, and patronism. LBJ also exploded the size of government with the Great Society which like the New Deal, failed in many ways. Richard Nixon took us off the gold standard which was a disastrous decision and his programs flopped badly. LBJ and Richard Nixon's social programs shackled millions of families in permanent government dependence. George W. Bush rolled back civil liberties with the PATRIOT Act and created the national security state we know today which Barack Obama dutifully expanded. Joe Biden colluded with Big Tech to censor Americans and tried to set up a government disinformation board.
As to the Presidents in the John Birch poll, here is my take on them. Teddy Roosevelt to me is the best President of the 20th Century. He built the Panama Canal, did the Square Deal, signed the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act into law, won the Nobel Prize for negotiating an end to the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War, his trust-busting, his environmental legislation, his conservation efforts, established the U.S. Forest Service, strengthened the U.S. Navy, expanded the American merchant marine, settled the 1902 Coal Stike in favor of the workers, and was the first President to invite a black guest to the White House for dinner in Booker T. Washington. Richard Nixon had many flaws, but I believe was still a great President. Nixon did detente with Russia and China, got U.S. troops out of Vietnam, saved Israel from annihilation during the Yom Kippur War, desegregated 80% of Southern schools, established Title XI, abolished the draft, signed the Rehabilitation Act to help people with disabilities, gave 18-year-olds the vote, created the EPA and signed landmark environmental legislation, and passed a slew of legislation to help the Native Americans. But to be sure, his betrayal of the Rhodesians will always be a blot on his legacy. Calvin Coolidge is a solid and underrated President. He cut taxes, reduced the federal spending, achieved budget surpluses, pulled U.S. troops out of South America, the incredible economic growth of the Roaring Twenties, spoke out against the KKK and lynching, the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, and cut the national debt significantly.
A terrific and thought provoking article by Will! As a Presidential history buff, I enjoyed this piece immensely! There were things in this piece I agreed and disagreed with. In my opinion, Theodore Roosevelt was the greatest President of the 20th Century. But to be sure, William McKinley is up there and is an underrated and under-appreciated President. I would rank McKinley as a near-great President. The Nineteenth Century warts and all, was a glorious time in our nation’s history. The 19th Century was unbelievably prosperous for us. Our rail infrastructure was increasingly developed as compared to other western countries, our industrial sector was the most innovative in the world, our agricultural sector was the most productive in the world. Our citizens enjoyed low taxes and businesses dealt with only minimal regulations.
I would also add that slavery was abolished, steam-powered machinery came into being, railways expanded, the telegraph was invented, and advances were made in steel production such as the Bessemer process. The Gilded Age’s rise of capitalism, the Transcontinental Railroad linked up America from Atlantic to Pacific, our nation saw its urbanization, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, electricity was adopted later in the century, and many other inventions were introduced to the world including the sewing machine, incandescent light bulb, phonograph, and the first gas-powered automobile. Westward expansion better known as the Manifest Destiny, expanded the borders of our glorious republic beyond our founding father’s wildest dreams. The Louisiana Purchase, annexation of Texas and the Klondike Gold Rush in Alaska all took place. Millions of immigrants arrived in the country from England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Poland, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, French Canada, Holland, Mexico, China, Japan, Norway, and Hungary and enriched this nation with their skills, talents, ideas, cultural traditions, foods, and brewing techniques among other things. The Women’s Suffrage Movement and labor movement were born during the century.
But the 19th Century was far from perfect and there were also some troubling things going on during the century. Reconstruction ended and the horrific system of Jim Crow would gradually come into being. The Ku Klux Klan was born in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1865 and would become America’s first terrorist group who terrorized blacks and white Republicans and fought to keep white supremacy in tact in the South. The frontier had finally reach its end and was officially closed and land was no longer free for anyone who wanted it. The Indian Wars came to an end with the bloody and horrific 1893 Wounded Knee Massacre in which men, women, children, babies, and old people were slaughtered by the U.S. Army. Industrialization increasingly meant that the United States was increasingly becoming a nation of plutocratic business owners, bankers, and lifelong, wage-earning employees rather than yeomen farmers, large planters, and enterprising merchants.
The Frederich List-derived American system of high tariffs powering domestic industry and domestic infrastructure investment was being phased out in favor of British-style free trade. Lastly, the 1860s had seen the bloodiest war in American history, the Civil War in which 620,000 men North and South lost their lives. The War Between the States settled the issues of secession from the union and slavery with an immense human cost and left much bad feeling coming as a result. Sectional antagonism was at an all-time high and it was uncertain at this point if America would ever be a united nation ever again. The frontier spirit was gone as there was now no wilderness for us to explore anymore. Many other aspects of American life were shifting as well. Sleepy towns and and yeoman and planter-owned farms were giving way to polluting smoke-spewing factories and bleak urban sprawl characterized mainly by impoverished migrants, crime, and grime. Heritage American gentlemen of the old Virginia gentry were no longer in charge, instead it was now mob bosses like Boss Tweed and political machines like Tammany Hall that now ran the political system and made corruption into an art form.
Plutocratic and exploitative factory owners squeezed every drop of effort and profit out of their broken, imported employees. Men, women and children slaved away in dangerous, dirty and overcrowded factories day in and day out for minuscule pay for hours on end. The massive wave of new immigrants had no frontier to settle and become American on. Industrialists were being squeezed by falling tariff rates. They in turn, squeezed their workers in order to recoup their lost profits. Religious adherence to the gold standard cause deflation which hurt small farmers, throwing even more formerly independent Americans into the gapping jaws of the unemployment line. Sadly, Fredrick Jackson Turner had been absolutely right in his prediction that the closing of the frontier radically reordered our political system. Now instead of the old disagreement of states’ rights and federal power, it was now increasingly socialistic populists against increasingly plutocratic Establishment figures. Alongside that, you had the fight between capitalists and labor. Among other violent clashes you had the Haymarket Riot, Homestead Strike, Pullman Strike, and the Reading Railroad Massacre. The Great Upheaval of the times caused many Americans to fear that a Paris Commune-style socialist revolution might be on the way.
McKinley got us into the Spanish American War, our introduction to global empire, as we colonized Cuba and the Philippines. Without this entry into Asia, we might have avoided the Pacific theatre of WWII, maybe even the whole thing. Our economic relations with China had a large influence in our strategic diplomacy with Japan. Teddy Roosevelt deserves the credit for developing the Panama Canal, McKinley did very little but help steer it towards Panama over Nicaragua.
You're probably right, but I still got a soft spot for Nixon and splitting China and Russia was a good tactical move and I don't blame him for outsourcing our jobs to China, that was under Clinton.
Yes, you are right on all counts
Thanks.
It was in these times that William McKinley former Governor of Ohio, was elected the 25th President of the United States in 1896. He would fix these issues or at least make them better well enough to keep America a somewhat recognizable country and fought for fair play for and to better the lot of minorities, Catholics, Jews, and workers He was the last President of the Civil War generation to serve in the White House. During the war he had fought in the Union Army’s 23rd Ohio Infantry. During the Battle of Antietam, he earned praise for driving a wagon of hot rations to soldiers despite being under heavy fire from the enemy. By the time the war was over, he had risen from a private to a brevet major. He ran a famous and iconic “front porch campaign” for President. McKinley deserves to be remembered as more than the guy who Teddy Roosevelt took over from. First off, he fought over the issue of tariffs aggressively and returned us to the American system in a way that helped the working man while protecting private property which deflated fears of revolution. Our agricultural and resource extraction industries needed high tariffs to thrive like they did. Higher wages attracted the best, most skilled workers thus higher quality products will be made, they sell better and the employer makes a greater profit. He balanced the needs of labor and capital in a way the benefited them both.
He staved off a socialist revolution by maintaining a high standard of living for the American working man, by not being hostile to capital, placing limitations on wage-depressing Chinese economic migration, and by putting forward a positive vision of American excellence in the present and future. McKinley encouraged reconciliation between the North and South. He built monuments to the Southern dead, encouraged Southerners to volunteer in the Spanish-American War which they did in great numbers, and refused to wave “the bloody shirt” and denigrate the South to rile up his Republican base. He managed to largely bring the South back into the nation and heal the wounds left in the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
McKinley was a civil rights champion who took significant steps on behalf of black Americans. He was limited in what he could do by the political realities of the times, but he still did much. He appointed thirty African Americans to federal office which was nearly as many as had been appointed by all his predecessors combined. He publicly denounced lynching as a “scourge.” He worked with prominent African American leaders such as Congressmen George Henry White to address racial injustice. During the Spanish-American War, he ensured that black soldiers could serve and be recruited. He also acted to stiffen federal penalties for lynch mobs. McKinley was also a champion of the rights of Native Americans. He appointed Ethan Allan Hitchcock a friend of the Indian, as his Secretary of the Interior. He vigorously prosecuted land fraud and assisted Native peoples and protected their rights. McKinley himself signed four executive orders providing land for Native American schools. When a bill came to his desk to open up what was left of Navajo land to white exploitation. He vetoed it and ruled in favor of the tribe. He then sent a message to Congress saying how unfair the proposed bill was to the Navajo and that signing it would not be just. McKinley furthermore chastised the whites who were up to no good for not even bothering to get the Navajo’s permission and asked why no attempt have made to negotiate with them. He even praised the Navajo for their “habits of industry and husbandry.”
President McKinley also fought for religious tolerance and stood up for Catholics and Jews. He was in fact, the first President to appoint Catholics to federal positions. He was also the first sitting President to visit a Catholic summer school in 1899. A shift in the Catholic vote from William Jennings Bryan to him helped secure his victory in the Presidential election in 1896. Lastly, he appointed Irish Catholic Terrence Powderly as Commissioner-General of Immigration. McKinley appointed a young Jew named Jacob Hollander to be the first treasurer of Puerto Rico’s new government. He openly engaged with American Jewish leaders and attended the 1897 Washington Hebrew Congregation cornerstone laying. McKinley and the party leadership blocked efforts to restrict the immigration of Jews and Eastern and Southern Europeans to America.
President McKinley also preserved the stability of America. He refused to remonetize silver and devalue our currency. He bought himself time with tariffs and the discovery of the Rand mines in South Africa which loosened up monetary conditions without requiring us to abandon the all-important gold standard. Lastly, he would redirect settlement energy outwards. He did that with the Spanish-American War, the annexation of Hawaii, getting the ball rolling on the negotiations for the building of the Panama Canal, and all the resultant opportunities for adventure abroad. This opened the door for men of talent and agency like a young Herbert Hoover, to go on business adventures by means of joining up with the Rough Riders or enlisting in the Navy or Marine Corps. Our 25th President deserves much more recognition than he gets from the public and historians!
The twentieth century was indeed an absolute disaster for the United States and the western world. The two World Wars badly damaged the West. The Cold War led to an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union that almost led to the destruction of the planet and all life on Earth. The power of the government has only grown more and more since the early twentieth century. Woodrow Wilson created the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission and the War Industries Board and signed into the law the Espionage and Sedition Acts. The former made criticism of the first world war illegal and locked up 1,000 Americans for doing so. The latter shut down, censored and monitored newspaper publications. FDR seized private property, conducted illegal wiretaps, tried to silence domestic opposition, and interned 110,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. The New Deal led to price fixing, court packing, regressive taxes, and patronism. LBJ also exploded the size of government with the Great Society which like the New Deal, failed in many ways. Richard Nixon took us off the gold standard which was a disastrous decision and his programs flopped badly. LBJ and Richard Nixon's social programs shackled millions of families in permanent government dependence. George W. Bush rolled back civil liberties with the PATRIOT Act and created the national security state we know today which Barack Obama dutifully expanded. Joe Biden colluded with Big Tech to censor Americans and tried to set up a government disinformation board.
As to the Presidents in the John Birch poll, here is my take on them. Teddy Roosevelt to me is the best President of the 20th Century. He built the Panama Canal, did the Square Deal, signed the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act into law, won the Nobel Prize for negotiating an end to the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War, his trust-busting, his environmental legislation, his conservation efforts, established the U.S. Forest Service, strengthened the U.S. Navy, expanded the American merchant marine, settled the 1902 Coal Stike in favor of the workers, and was the first President to invite a black guest to the White House for dinner in Booker T. Washington. Richard Nixon had many flaws, but I believe was still a great President. Nixon did detente with Russia and China, got U.S. troops out of Vietnam, saved Israel from annihilation during the Yom Kippur War, desegregated 80% of Southern schools, established Title XI, abolished the draft, signed the Rehabilitation Act to help people with disabilities, gave 18-year-olds the vote, created the EPA and signed landmark environmental legislation, and passed a slew of legislation to help the Native Americans. But to be sure, his betrayal of the Rhodesians will always be a blot on his legacy. Calvin Coolidge is a solid and underrated President. He cut taxes, reduced the federal spending, achieved budget surpluses, pulled U.S. troops out of South America, the incredible economic growth of the Roaring Twenties, spoke out against the KKK and lynching, the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, and cut the national debt significantly.
A terrific and thought provoking article by Will! As a Presidential history buff, I enjoyed this piece immensely! There were things in this piece I agreed and disagreed with. In my opinion, Theodore Roosevelt was the greatest President of the 20th Century. But to be sure, William McKinley is up there and is an underrated and under-appreciated President. I would rank McKinley as a near-great President. The Nineteenth Century warts and all, was a glorious time in our nation’s history. The 19th Century was unbelievably prosperous for us. Our rail infrastructure was increasingly developed as compared to other western countries, our industrial sector was the most innovative in the world, our agricultural sector was the most productive in the world. Our citizens enjoyed low taxes and businesses dealt with only minimal regulations.
I would also add that slavery was abolished, steam-powered machinery came into being, railways expanded, the telegraph was invented, and advances were made in steel production such as the Bessemer process. The Gilded Age’s rise of capitalism, the Transcontinental Railroad linked up America from Atlantic to Pacific, our nation saw its urbanization, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, electricity was adopted later in the century, and many other inventions were introduced to the world including the sewing machine, incandescent light bulb, phonograph, and the first gas-powered automobile. Westward expansion better known as the Manifest Destiny, expanded the borders of our glorious republic beyond our founding father’s wildest dreams. The Louisiana Purchase, annexation of Texas and the Klondike Gold Rush in Alaska all took place. Millions of immigrants arrived in the country from England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Poland, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, French Canada, Holland, Mexico, China, Japan, Norway, and Hungary and enriched this nation with their skills, talents, ideas, cultural traditions, foods, and brewing techniques among other things. The Women’s Suffrage Movement and labor movement were born during the century.
But the 19th Century was far from perfect and there were also some troubling things going on during the century. Reconstruction ended and the horrific system of Jim Crow would gradually come into being. The Ku Klux Klan was born in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1865 and would become America’s first terrorist group who terrorized blacks and white Republicans and fought to keep white supremacy in tact in the South. The frontier had finally reach its end and was officially closed and land was no longer free for anyone who wanted it. The Indian Wars came to an end with the bloody and horrific 1893 Wounded Knee Massacre in which men, women, children, babies, and old people were slaughtered by the U.S. Army. Industrialization increasingly meant that the United States was increasingly becoming a nation of plutocratic business owners, bankers, and lifelong, wage-earning employees rather than yeomen farmers, large planters, and enterprising merchants.
The Frederich List-derived American system of high tariffs powering domestic industry and domestic infrastructure investment was being phased out in favor of British-style free trade. Lastly, the 1860s had seen the bloodiest war in American history, the Civil War in which 620,000 men North and South lost their lives. The War Between the States settled the issues of secession from the union and slavery with an immense human cost and left much bad feeling coming as a result. Sectional antagonism was at an all-time high and it was uncertain at this point if America would ever be a united nation ever again. The frontier spirit was gone as there was now no wilderness for us to explore anymore. Many other aspects of American life were shifting as well. Sleepy towns and and yeoman and planter-owned farms were giving way to polluting smoke-spewing factories and bleak urban sprawl characterized mainly by impoverished migrants, crime, and grime. Heritage American gentlemen of the old Virginia gentry were no longer in charge, instead it was now mob bosses like Boss Tweed and political machines like Tammany Hall that now ran the political system and made corruption into an art form.
Plutocratic and exploitative factory owners squeezed every drop of effort and profit out of their broken, imported employees. Men, women and children slaved away in dangerous, dirty and overcrowded factories day in and day out for minuscule pay for hours on end. The massive wave of new immigrants had no frontier to settle and become American on. Industrialists were being squeezed by falling tariff rates. They in turn, squeezed their workers in order to recoup their lost profits. Religious adherence to the gold standard cause deflation which hurt small farmers, throwing even more formerly independent Americans into the gapping jaws of the unemployment line. Sadly, Fredrick Jackson Turner had been absolutely right in his prediction that the closing of the frontier radically reordered our political system. Now instead of the old disagreement of states’ rights and federal power, it was now increasingly socialistic populists against increasingly plutocratic Establishment figures. Alongside that, you had the fight between capitalists and labor. Among other violent clashes you had the Haymarket Riot, Homestead Strike, Pullman Strike, and the Reading Railroad Massacre. The Great Upheaval of the times caused many Americans to fear that a Paris Commune-style socialist revolution might be on the way.
McKinley got us into the Spanish American War, our introduction to global empire, as we colonized Cuba and the Philippines. Without this entry into Asia, we might have avoided the Pacific theatre of WWII, maybe even the whole thing. Our economic relations with China had a large influence in our strategic diplomacy with Japan. Teddy Roosevelt deserves the credit for developing the Panama Canal, McKinley did very little but help steer it towards Panama over Nicaragua.
America had relations with China and Japan well before McKinley