William McKinley was born on January 29, 1843, in the small town of Niles, Ohio. He lived there until age ten, when he moved with his family to nearby Poland, Ohio. His loving family provided William Jr., the seventh of eight children, with a fun-filled childhood that was also carefully guided by his parents. Like most young boys, he spent his childhood fishing, hunting, ice skating, horseback riding, and swimming. His father owned a small iron foundry and instilled in young William a strong work ethic and a respectful attitude. Nancy Allison McKinley, his devoutly religious mother, taught him the value of prayer, courtesy, and honesty in all dealings.
Education and Military Service
Education was important to William, and he studied hard at a school run by the Presbyterian seminary in his hometown of Poland, Ohio. Upon graduation, he entered Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, in 1860. He attended Allegheny for only one term, however, because of illness and financial difficulties.
When the Civil War started, William joined the Twenty-third Ohio Volunteer Infantry. During the war, the young private proved himself a valiant soldier on the battlefield, especially at the bloody battle of Antietam. As a commissioned officer, Second Lieutenant McKinley served on the staff of Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes, future President of the United States. His relationship with Hayes, whom he considered his mentor, remained constant throughout his life. He ended his four-year stint in the Army as a brevet major, gaining a title that would stay with him throughout his political career.
Law and Political Career
When the Civil War ended, McKinley returned to Ohio to begin his career in law and politics. He studied law at Albany Law School and, after passing the bar exam in 1867, began his legal practice in Canton, Ohio. At a Canton picnic in 1869—the year he entered politics—McKinley met and began courting his future wife, Ida Saxton, marrying her two years later. He was twenty-seven and she was twenty-three at the time.
Although practicing law was his profession, being involved with the Republican organization secured his future. His first election in 1869 was for county prosecutor. He ran successfully for Congress in 1876 and served until 1891, with the exception of one brief period when he lost in the election of 1882. As a congressman, McKinley became chair of the House Ways and Means Committee in 1889. In that powerful position, he drafted and steered to passage the McKinley Tariff of 1890. Because this strongly protectionist measure increased consumer prices considerably, angry voters rejected McKinley and many other Republicans in the 1890 election. Stunned by his defeat, McKinley returned home to Ohio and ran for governor in 1891, a race which he won, but only by a narrow margin.
As governor, McKinley worked to control—and, he hoped, to lessen—the discord between management and labor. He developed a system of arbitration designed to settle labor disagreements and convinced Ohio Republicans, many of whom refused to acknowledge the rights of labor, to support his arbitration program. McKinley, while sympathetic to workers, proved unwilling to acquiesce to all of their demands, calling out the National Guard in 1894 to curtail strike-related violence by the members of the United Mine Workers. In the face of the economic woes of the mid-1890s, McKinley showed himself to be a skilled and able politician. He even gained widespread public sympathy when his own financial fortunes suffered during the economic depression of 1893—he had co-signed the loans of a friend who subsequently went bankrupt. Winning favor with the voters, he was returned to the governor's office in 1894. With congressional and gubernatorial experience under his belt, as well as widespread popularity in the Republican Party, McKinley was in position to make a run for the White House in 1896.
The Campaign and Election of 1896:
The Panic of 1893, one of America's most devastating economic collapses, placed the Democrats on the defensive and restored Governor McKinley's stature in national politics. McKinley dominated the political arena at the opening of the 1896 Republican presidential nominating convention held in St. Louis. His commitment to protectionism as a solution to unemployment and his popularity in the Republican Party—as well as the behind-the-scenes political management of his chief political supporter, affluent businessman Marcus Hanna of Ohio—gave McKinley the nomination on the first ballot. He accumulated 661 votes compared to the 84 votes won by his nearest rival, House Speaker Thomas B. Reed of Maine.
The Republican platform endorsed protective tariffs and the gold standard while leaving open the door to an international agreement on bimetallism. It also supported the acquisition of Hawaii, construction of a canal across Central America, expansion of the Navy, restrictions on the acceptance of illiterate immigrants into the country, equal pay for equal work for women, and a national board of arbitration to settle labor disputes.
The Democrats, meeting in Chicago, rallied behind William Jennings Bryan, a former congressman from Nebraska. A superb orator, Bryan stirred Democrats with his stinging attack on the gold standard and his defense of bimetallism and free silver. He won the nomination on the fifth ballot. The Democrats pegged their hopes for victory on their opposition to (1) the protective tariff, (2) the immigration of foreign "pauper labor," and (3) the use of injunctions to end strikes. They also supported a federal income tax, a stronger Interstate Commerce Commission, statehood for the western states (Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona), and the anti-Spanish revolutionaries in Cuba, who were also supported by the Republicans.
Realizing that the Democrats had stolen their thunder on free silver, the insurgent Populist Party, which sought to organize and support farmers' interests, fused with the Democrats to nominate Bryan for President. Faced with the loss of the Solid South and the Far West, owing to the silver issue, the Republicans raised a staggering $4 million for the campaign. A majority of the contributions came from business, particularly protectionist manufacturers who supported high tariffs and bankers who wanted to maintain sound money policies. Most of these funds went into the printing and distribution of 200 million pamphlets. McKinley, following the tradition of previous candidates who campaigned for President from their homes, delivered 350 carefully crafted speeches from his front porch in Canton to 750,000 visiting delegates. Some 1,400 party speakers stumped the nation, painting Bryan as a radical, a demagogue, and a socialist. Republican speakers de-emphasized their party's stand on bimetallism and instead championed a protective tariff that promised full employment and industrial growth.
Bryan, in response, stumped the nation in a strenuous campaign, covering 18,000 miles in just three months. He spoke to wildly enthusiastic crowds, condemning McKinley as the puppet of big business and political managers. However, midway through his campaign, Bryan's pace faltered. His strategy for dual party support failed. Gold Democrats bolted the party, unhappy with Bryan's stand on bimetallism and free silver. Some urban-based progressives, who worried about Bryan's evangelistic style and moralistic fervor, also deserted the Democrats. Moreover, Bryan failed to build support outside his Populist and agrarian base, especially in the face of McKinley's effective campaigning on economic issues.
Bryan lost to McKinley by a margin of approximately 600,000 votes, the greatest electoral sweep in twenty-five years. McKinley received over a third more electoral college votes than Bryan. The Republican victory reflected a winning coalition of urban residents in the North, prosperous midwestern farmers, industrial workers, ethnic voters (with the exception of the Irish), and reform-minded professionals. It launched a long period of Republican power lasting until 1932, broken only by Woodrow Wilson's victory in 1912, which occurred principally because of a split in the Republican Party.
The Campaign and Election of 1900
After four years in office, McKinley's popularity had risen because of his image as the victorious commander-in-chief of the Spanish-American War (see Foreign Affairs section) and because of the nation's general return to economic prosperity. Hence, he was easily renominated in 1900 as the Republican candidate. The most momentous event at the Philadelphia convention centered on the vice presidential nomination of Governor Theodore Roosevelt of New York. Vice President Garret A. Hobart of New Jersey had died in office, and Roosevelt's candidacy added a popular war hero and reform governor to the ticket. Setting up the stage for a rematch of the 1896 election, the Democrats again nominated Bryan at their convention in Kansas City. Grover Cleveland's former vice president, Adlai E. Stevenson, took the second spot on the Democratic slate.
The rematch played to old and new issues. Bryan refused to back off his call for free silver even though the recent discoveries of gold in Alaska and South Africa had inflated the world's money supply and increased world prices. As a result, the U.S. farming industry saw its profits grow as crops such as corn commanded more money on the market. Farmer dissatisfaction was less than it was in 1896, and gold was the reason behind it. Hence, Bryan's silver plank was a nonissue to the farming community, which was one of his main constituent groups. Responding to these voter sentiments, Democratic Party managers included the silver plank in their platform but placed greater emphasis on expansionism and protectionism as the key issues in the election. The Democrats also opposed McKinley's war against Philippine insurgents and the emergence of an American empire, viewing the latter as contrary to the basic character of the nation. The Republicans countered with a spirited defense of America's interests in foreign markets. They advocated expanding ties with China, a protectorate status for the Philippines, and an antitrust policy that condemned monopolies while approving the "honest cooperation of capital to meet new business conditions" in foreign markets.
Duplicating the campaign tactics of 1896, the Republicans spent several million dollars on 125 million campaign documents, including 21 million postcards and 2 million written inserts that were distributed to over 5,000 newspapers weekly. They also employed 600 speakers and poll watchers. As in 1896, McKinley stayed at home dispensing carefully written speeches. His running mate, Theodore Roosevelt, campaigned across the nation, condemning Bryan as a dangerous threat to America's prosperity and status.
Although not a landslide shift comparable to election swings in the twentieth century, McKinley's victory ended the pattern of close popular margins that had characterized elections since the Civil War. McKinley received 7,218,491 votes (51.7 percent) to Bryan's 6,356,734 votes (45.5 percent)—a gain for the Republicans of 114,000 votes over their total in 1896. McKinley received nearly twice as many electoral votes as Bryan did. In congressional elections that year, Republicans held fifty-five Senate seats to the Democrats' thirty-one, and McKinley's party captured 197 House seats compared to the Democrats' 151. Indeed, the Republican Party had become the majority political party in the nation.
Tariff Legislation
True to his campaign promises, McKinley called a special session of Congress to revise the tariff upward. In 1896, customs duties earned $160 million in revenue for the United States—the largest component of government income. Various internal revenue duties brought in approximately $145 million—alcohol taxes earned $114.5 million, tobacco taxes brought in another $30.7 million, and stamp taxes garnered $260,000. McKinley had campaigned to increase the tariff income both as a means of reducing internal taxes and as a means of encouraging the expansion of domestic industry and employment of American workers. The resulting Dingley Tariff Act, sponsored by Republican Congressman Nelson R. Dingley of Maine, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, raised rates to an average rate of 49 percent. The bill included a grant of authority to the President empowering him to negotiate reductions of up to 20 percent, to move products to a so-called free list, or to drop items from the list based upon mutual negotiations. McKinley, however, did not remain a protectionist nor a supporter of tariffs for the duration of his presidency. In 1901, only a day before his death, he announced his support for reciprocal trade treaties, a considerable shift in his thinking about trade policy.Race Relations
Among the other domestic issues that occupied McKinley's attention were race relations, trust regulation, labor relations, and the civil service. Unwilling to alienate the white South, the President did little to address the growing disfranchisement and exclusion of black Americans from political power. McKinley denounced lynching in his 1897 inaugural address but failed to condemn that practice formally. He also refrained from taking action to curtail the general anti-black violence in the South that had reached near epidemic proportions in the last four years of the century. Instead, McKinley's initiatives in race relations were largely cosmetic. He appointed thirty African Americans to "positions of consequence," which were principally in diplomatic and records offices, but that number fell far short of what black Republicans had wanted from the leader of Abraham Lincoln's party. During the Spanish-American War, he countermanded orders preventing the recruitment and service of black soldiers. Neither of these actions did much to stem the deteriorating position of blacks in American society.Trust Regulation
In the matter of monopolies, McKinley differentiated in his mind between good and bad trusts. He thought that great consolidations of industry were necessary in the face of international competition, but he wanted some way to insure that the public interest would be protected. His administration endorsed the opinion of the Supreme Court, which had limited, in United States v. E. C. Knight (1895), antitrust suits to those cases in which a corporation possessed a monopoly of interstate commerce. McKinley's 1899 annual message talked of strengthening the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, but he proposed no new legislation. It would remain for his successor in office, Theodore Roosevelt, to move decisively to discipline "bad" trusts.Labor Relations
McKinley increased his favorable standing with organized labor by his support for the Dingley Tariff and his appointment of various labor leaders to government positions. For example, Terence V. Powderly, one-time head of the Knights of Labor, became commissioner general of immigration. Additionally, the endorsement of the Erdman Act of 1898, which created a mechanism for mediating wage disputes on interstate railroads, as well as support for the exclusion of Chinese workers encouraged labor leaders. McKinley further indicated his support of labor by holding cordial meetings with Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor. The one presidential action that upset labor involved the President's use of federal troops to keep order during a strike of mine workers in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. But it was not enough, in view of the general patriotism of most workers during the Spanish-American War, to sour organized labor on President McKinley.Civil Service
With regard to civil service, the great reform issue of the 1870s and 1880s, McKinley sought a middle ground. Republicans were upset with President Grover Cleveland's expansion of the merit list of office holders—jobs open to appointment and removal only for cause or merit—because it had entrenched numerous Democrats in key secretarial and customs positions. McKinley bowed to the pressure and issued an executive order that removed approximately 4,000 positions from the list. Civil service reformers painted McKinley as a party hack controlled by his managers, especially his friend Mark Hanna, a recently elected U.S. senator from Ohio and a longtime political supporter.As the new century loomed just over the horizon, the time seemed ripe for many Americans to look beyond their continental borders to a place of destiny in the world. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner had warned Americans, in his much-reproduced speech delivered at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, that the new century would be the first in U.S. history in which no frontier existed for them to conquer. Many Americans interpreted this to mean that new frontiers were integral to national greatness. For example, Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan preached the doctrine of American expansionism in twenty books and numerous widely quoted essays. He asserted that no modern nation could be a great nation without a powerful navy, a superior merchant fleet, and overseas colonies. Turner's lectures and Mahan's writings greatly influenced political leaders like Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge. These individuals looked beyond American shores for new frontiers, world markets, and overseas colonies.
American Empire
The quest for empire was not a universally accepted project, however. A sizeable number of Americans feared that overseas expansion would be too costly, would bring non-white peoples into the American nation, and would deviate from the traditional isolationist stance of the nation's foreign policy. Sugar producers in the lower South viewed the potential absorption of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines as an economic threat. The "anti-imperialists," as their leading historian called them, included former Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, author Mark Twain, and dissident Republicans like Andrew Carnegie and Benjamin Harrison. While the anti-imperialists came from different occupations, political parties, and ideological backgrounds, they all opposed territorial expansion.
Spanish-American War
In this contentious political atmosphere, McKinley was forced to deal with the problem of Cuba—a foreign policy issue the Cleveland administration had little success in solving. Spain's repressive rule over Cuba had caused the Cubans to revolt in 1895. Spain responded with ferocity, launching its reconcentrado campaign that herded 300,000 Cubans into camps where, the Spanish reasoned, they could not help the insurgents. Spain's brutal attempts to put down the rebellion infuriated many Americans, who began to raise money and even fight on the side of the Cuban nationalists. American businesses with economic interests on the island, moreover, worried about the safety of their investments. McKinley wanted an end to the Cuban-Spanish conflict but demanded that Spain act responsibly and humanely and that any settlement be acceptable to Cuban nationals. Throughout 1897, McKinley pressured Spain to make concessions to meet these ends.
In November 1897, a resolution appeared possible when the Spanish granted the Cubans limited autonomy and closed the reconcentration camps. But after pro-Spanish demonstrators rioted in Havana in January 1898 to protest Spain's more conciliatory policies, McKinley ordered the U.S. battleship Maine to Havana harbor, both to protect American citizens and property and to demonstrate that the United States still valued Spain's friendship. With the Maine safely moored in Spanish waters, the publication in the New York Journal of a letter, intercepted by Cuban nationals, written by Enrique Dupuy de Lome, Spanish minister to the United States, jolted the Spanish-American relationship. De Lome's letter described McKinley as "weak and a bidder for the admirations of the crowd . . .," and, more importantly, revealed that the Spanish were not negotiating in good faith with the United States. Americans saw the letter as an attack on both McKinley's and the nation's honor.
The public's anger only intensified following an explosion on the Maine and its sinking on February 15, 1898, in Havana Harbor, killing 266 crew members. McKinley ordered an investigation of the Maine explosion even while some Americans cried, "Remember the Maine! To Hell with Spain!" and pressed for war. As Spain and the United States searched earnestly and unsuccessfully for a diplomatic solution, the Navy, on March 21, reported that an external explosion, presumably from a Spanish mine, had destroyed the ship.
With his diplomatic initiatives exhausted and the American public wanting an end to the Cuban crisis, McKinley, in mid-April, asked Congress for authority to intervene in Cuba, which it granted. Spain soon broke relations with the United States, and the United States blockaded Cuba's ports. On April 23, Spain declared war on the United States, an act the United States returned in kind two days later. Congress added the Teller amendment to its declaration of war, committing the United States to the independence of Cuba once the war had ended, disclaiming "any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction or control over said island, except for the pacification thereof."
After the declarations of war, events moved quickly and decisively in America's favor. On May 1, Commodore George Dewey destroyed Spain's ten-ship Pacific fleet in Manila Bay without losing a single man. McKinley pushed through a joint resolution of Congress annexing the Hawaiian Islands. In Cuba, U.S. forces, including the Rough Riders led by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, captured Santiago. The U.S. Navy destroyed Spain's Atlantic fleet in the waters between Cuba and Jamaica, and U.S. troops captured Puerto Rico. Spain sued for peace, and a cease-fire was declared on August 12. One day later, Commodore Dewey's forces completed their campaign against the Spanish in the Philippines by taking Manila. During the fighting, McKinley operated a war room from the White House, complete with detailed maps and a battery of telephones through which he kept in constant contact with his generals in the field. The war had lasted just over three months, and the Americans killed in action numbered less than 400, although many more had died from malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases.
The Paris Peace Treaty was signed on December 10, 1898. Under this treaty, the United States obtained Puerto Rico, Guam, and—for $20 million—the Philippine Islands. Spain also renounced its claim to Cuba, which remained under U.S. military occupation until 1902. Thereafter, Cuba would be a U.S. protectorate until 1934. Congress took nearly two months to ratify the treaty, but did so—securing the necessary two-thirds majority by a single vote—on February 6, 1899. Despite the heated debates and protests of congressional lawmakers, McKinley was able to secure the treaty's approval and to convince the House to appropriate funds for implementing and building the American empire. In demonstrating his political influence on the outcome of these matters, McKinley became the undisputed leader of the Republican Party. Furthermore, his actions represented a real expansion of presidential power at the turn of the century. Under McKinley's leadership, the United States had become one of the world's colonial powers.
Filipino Revolt
Almost as soon as the war with Spain had ended, a grassroots insurgency broke out in the Philippines led by Filipino nationalist Emilio Aguinaldo. McKinley responded by sending thousands of American marines and sailors to the islands. This action engaged the nationalists in a bloody war that left the United States open to atrocity charges similar to those lodged against Spain in its dealings with Cuba and the reconcentration camps. The war lasted until 1902, and before it was over, it claimed the lives of more than 5,000 Americans and some 200,000 Filipinos.
Open Door Trade Policy in China and the Boxer Rebellion
American interests in Asia were not limited to the Philippines. China emerged as a major foreign policy concern for the McKinley administration, especially as Britain, Germany, France, Russia, and Japan, among others, scrambled throughout the 1890s to establish their own "spheres of influence" in that nation. Fearful that the Europeans and Japanese might close Chinese ports to U.S. commerce, McKinley authorized Secretary of State John Hay to issue an "Open Door" note on China. This circular strongly expressed the American desire to place all commercial nations on an equal footing in China, unencumbered by discriminatory tariffs or other restrictions. It also declared U.S. support for a non-colonized and independent China. The "Open Door" policy stands as one of the most important policy statements ever issued by the U.S. State Department.
In June 1900, a group of Chinese nationalists who objected to foreign intrusions in their country massacred numerous western missionaries and Chinese converts to Christianity. Popularly known as the Boxers, this group also laid siege to the foreign community of diplomats in Peking. McKinley dispatched 2,500 U.S. troops—without seeking congressional approval—and several gunboats to assist a combined expeditionary force of British, German, Russian, and Japanese troops in the liberation of the foreign delegations. Secretary of State John Hay issued a second "Open Door" note in the midst of the Boxer Rebellion that warned America's expeditionary partners that the United States supported intervention only to rescue the diplomats, not to bring China under European and Japanese control. By August, the allied force had successfully put down the Boxer Rebellion. China was forced to pay an indemnity in excess of $300 million, $25 million of which went to the United States.
William McKinley traveled more than any American President up to that time, and he was on the road again on the morning of September 6, 1901. Impeccably dressed in a boiled white shirt with a starched collar and cuffs, pin-striped trousers, a black frock coat, and a black satin necktie, he was off to Buffalo, New York, where he gave a speech at the Pan-American Exposition. That afternoon, he attended a public reception at the exposition's Temple of Music. Standing at the head of a moving line of greeters, McKinley shook hands and smiled, enjoying the adulation and the public contact.
At seven minutes past four o'clock, as McKinley reached for another hand to shake, two sharp cracks broke the hum of human voices. Leon F. Czolgosz, age twenty-eight, a Detroit resident of Polish heritage and an unemployed mill worker of anarchist sentiments, had fired a concealed .32 Iver Johnson revolver point blank into the President's chest. McKinley doubled over and fell backward into the arms of his Secret Service escorts. As he lay bleeding from his wounds, he managed to tell his guards not to hurt his assailant. Then he turned to his private secretary and said: "My wife, be careful, Cortelyou, how you tell her—oh, be careful." Rushed to a nearby hospital by ambulance, McKinley's doctors predicted a recovery. Gangrene had set in around the bullet wounds, however, and he died on September 14, 1901, just six months after his second inauguration.
Czolgosz admitted the shooting. He had taken aim at the President because he believed him to have been the "enemy of the people, the good working people." Czolgosz expressed no remorse for his actions and died in the electric chair on October 29, 1901.
With no surviving children and an invalid wife, President McKinley's private and family life was narrowly drawn. He usually spent his evenings playing cards with his wife or his personal secretary, George B. Cortelyou, answering letters, and taking walks or carriage rides. He enjoyed smoking cigars—only in private—and occasionally chewed them as well. Just before retiring for the night, he liked to take a drink of whiskey.
He also enjoyed dressing up and meeting people. His trademark pink carnation always decorated his lapel, and he liked giving it to acquaintances as a personal token of his affection. A complete Christian gentleman, he winced at swearing and often prayed before making momentous decisions, including the decision to go to war with Spain. In fact, McKinley opposed going to war in Cuba unless he deemed it necessary to free the island—a stance that Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley's assistant secretary of the Navy at the time, once described as leaving the President with "no more backbone than a chocolate eclair." Although some of McKinley's supporters expressed frustration over his fair-minded approach to life, almost anyone who had spent time with him liked him.
According to the Bureau of the Census, the nation's population reached 72.2 million in 1897. Three years later, the census showed the population divided between 38.8 million men and 37.2 million women. It also reported 66.9 million whites; 9.2 million blacks; 238,196 American Indians; 24,326 Japanese; and 89,863 Chinese in the nation. The majority of Americans (47.4 million) lived in the northeastern and north central areas of the country. The South's population stood at 24.5 million. The West contained a much smaller population of 4.1 million.
Urban Growth
Although more people (45.8 million) still lived on farms and in rural settings in 1900 than in urban areas (30.2 million), urban population increases from 1890 to 1900 were far greater than those in rural areas—a 38 percent increase compared to 11 percent, respectively. The number of individuals in cities of 1 million or more reached 6.4 million: New York (3.4 million), Chicago (1.7 million), and Philadelphia (1.3 million).
Transportation
Most of these Americans, even the rural dwellers, were tied together as never before by railroads, the telegraph, rural postal delivery service, and even the telephone. Railroads carried 501 million passengers a year over 245,334 miles of track. A large percentage of these travelers were salesmen and manufacturing representatives. Countless others were European immigrants who traveled on trains from eastern port cities to work in midwestern meat-packing houses and the interior flour mills. Texas longhorn cattle were butchered in Chicago and transported in refrigerated railcars to wholesalers in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and hundreds of other urban centers around the nation.
Women's Political Movement
During the 1890s, hundreds of thousands of women joined local women's clubs, self-help organizations, and public associations. Thirty-nine percent of all college students were women (85,400) in 1900, and nearly 25,000 women attended all-female colleges. Many of these club women and college graduates joined the chorus for progressive reforms that included women's suffrage, prohibition, child labor laws, municipal ownership of urban public service industries (gas and water), and other social justice issues.
This new activism of American women began to pay political dividends in the 1890s, particularly with regard to suffrage. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, leading American suffragists, formed a new organization in 1890, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), to spearhead the drive to give women the vote. NAWSA articulated a new argument for suffrage, one that downplayed equality in favor of regarding women as different from men. Women, NAWSA claimed, possessed a moral sense and a nurturing quality that would introduce—when they were granted suffrage—an element of virtue and compassion into politics. While NAWSA failed more than it succeeded in the 1890s, suffragists could point to some successes, especially in the western United States. Wyoming (1890), Colorado (1893), Idaho (1896), and Utah (1896) each gave women the right to vote, although these advances resulted from each state's particular political circumstances rather than the power of the suffragist movement.
Employment and Economics
In 1900, more than 29 million Americans made up the U.S. work force, representing 38 percent of the total population of nearly 76 million people. Most of these workers tilled the land as farmers or hired farm laborers (between 11 to 13 million) while nearly 5 million Americans worked in manufacturing industries. Construction and transportation employed over 3 million workers while another 2 million worked in the trade, finance, and real estate. Four million Americans held down service jobs as clerks, sales representatives, telephone operators, secretaries, etc., and a little over 300,000 Americans worked for the government, principally at the state and local levels. Those without work, the unemployed, numbered nearly 2 million people.
Workers labored, on the average, around fifty-nine hours a week in the non-agricultural sectors of the economy. Average annual income for all professions in 1897 was $411, and a family of five needed $500 per year to achieve subsistence. Nearly 2 million children were employed in some form of work in 1900. When Andrew Carnegie sold his Carnegie Steel Mills to a syndicate of investment bankers and corporate industrialists, he pocketed $500 million dollars—equivalent in 1999 prices to over $50 billion.
Status of African Americans
Black Americans experienced another decade of disfranchisement, dislocation, and dismay in the 1890s. African Americans remained a predominantly rural and southern people; however, nearly 200,000 blacks left the rural South for the North and West between 1890 and 1910. Every southern state passed Jim Crow laws in the 1890s, which legalized the rigid separation of black and white races. During the 1890s, well more than 100 blacks were lynched each year, a horrible testimony to the power of white racism at the dawn of the new century.
Suffrage Movement
Voter participation peaked in the election of 1896 at around 80 percent of the eligible voters in non-southern states. Thereafter, voter participation in non-southern states began a steady drop from 74 percent in 1900 to less than 60 percent in 1920. Much of the decline stemmed from intensified restrictions on the franchise. In the 1880s, eighteen states allowed immigrants to vote without first becoming citizens. By 1912, only seven states—all with small immigrant populations—still allowed alien suffrage. Also, virtually every state passed some form of personal registration law between 1890 and 1920, often requiring personal registration and proper identification, a period of residency, intervals between registration and voting, literacy tests, property qualification, and poll taxes.
These registration laws kept many recent immigrants and working-class citizens from the polls in non-southern states. In the South, African American voting participation suffered terribly as literacy tests, poll taxes, and property qualifications as well as threats of violence disfranchised black voters. A combination of northern progressives—including leading women suffragettes who opposed machine politics—and white racists in the South supported these measures that limited the franchise of blacks, workers, and recent immigrants.
President William McKinley's reputation has undergone considerable revision in recent years. For the first sixty years of the twentieth century, historians believed that McKinley had been a weak President pressured into the war with Spain by popular passions and a nationalistic press. Most interpretations held that McKinley's weakness extended to the domestic political arena. McKinley was a managed President, so the thinking went, a chief executive handled by his political cronies, especially Mark Hanna. McKinley, moreover, suffered in comparison to his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, whom historians thought possessed—often in abundance—many of the characteristics that McKinley lacked.
In the 1960s, a new assessment of McKinley emerged, however. Revisionist historians, suspicious of politicians generally and critical of American imperialism, began to portray McKinley as a cunning and manipulative leader bent on expanding American influence in the world. Current scholarship paints a different picture of McKinley: Regarding the Spanish-American crisis over Cuba, he is now viewed as a President who tried mightily to avoid war—in spite of public pressure and flash points such as the sinking of the USS Maine—who acted decisively when all the diplomatic cards had been played, and who asserted great presidential authority over his cabinet and generals.
Recent historians have reinterpreted McKinley's relationship with Hanna as well. They portray McKinley using Hanna for his own ends rather than the other way around, noting Hanna's inability to stop the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt for Republican vice president in 1900 regardless of his protests to McKinley. At almost every turn, McKinley is now viewed as the chief determinant and mover of Republican domestic and foreign policy in the last years of the nineteenth century.
No issue has inspired more spirited debate among scholars than the course of American foreign policy amid McKinley's presidency. During his tenure, the United States acquired overseas territories, fought and won a war with a European power, and attempted to set international norms regarding trade with China. In short, the United States emerged on the world stage in new and unprecedented ways. There is little agreement among scholars, however, on exactly why this occurred. Some historians argue that economic considerations and the search for open markets drove America's foreign policy in these years. Others contend that a sense of moral responsibility—the "white man's burden"—led America into Cuba and the Philippines. Geostrategic concerns, according to other scholars, launched the United States on an imperial path. Still other historians assert that a desire to protect and enhance notions of America's "manhood" led the United States into conflict in Cuba and toward imperialism.
Each of these explanations has strengths and weaknesses, with none proving completely satisfactory. In contrast, a consensus is emerging among scholars on the ways in which McKinley helped create the modern presidency. His use of the telephone, the press, and publicity to conduct and manage war and political campaigns became staples of his successors. He invited the nation's press to regular briefings by him or his assistants, establishing the forerunner of the presidential press conference. He understood the political advantage to be found in the use of mailings and printed propaganda. He greatly expanded the presidential staff, and he traveled widely across the nation making speeches, attending public ceremonies, and meeting his constituency.
Even so, the McKinley years merely suggested the changes that would occur to the American presidency during the twentieth century. McKinley was not a charismatic leader, and he did not inject drama into presidential affairs like his successors, especially the two Roosevelts and Wilson. Nor did he try to use his office as a bully pulpit to rally Americans to his policies and programs—initiatives which, in themselves, were small in scale compared to those put forward by his successors. Rather, William McKinley was an affable man and an astute and patient politician whose political skills and confidence enabled him to make firm decisions even when they were not popular ones. He did not reinvent the presidency, but he did work very successfully within the prevailing limitations and conception of the office.
Theodore Roosevelt, who came into office in 1901 and served until 1909, is considered the first modern President because he significantly expanded the influence and power of the executive office. From the Civil War to the turn of the twentieth century, the seat of power in the national government resided in the U.S. Congress. Beginning in the 1880s, the executive branch gradually increased its power. Roosevelt seized on this trend, believing that the President had the right to use all powers except those that were specifically denied him to accomplish his goals. As a result, the President, rather than Congress or the political parties, became the center of the American political arena. As President, Roosevelt challenged the ideas of limited government and individualism. In their stead, he advocated government regulation to achieve social and economic justice. He used executive orders to accomplish his goals, especially in conservation, and waged an aggressive foreign policy. He was also an extremely popular President and the first to use the media to appeal directly to the people, bypassing the political parties and career politicians.
Early Life
Frail and sickly as a boy, "Teedie" Roosevelt developed a rugged physique as a teenager and became a lifelong advocate of exercise and the "strenuous life." After graduating from Harvard, Roosevelt married Alice Hathaway Lee and studied law at Columbia University. He dropped out after a year to pursue politics, winning a seat in the New York Assembly in 1882.
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A double tragedy struck Roosevelt in 1884, when his mother and his wife died in the same house on the same day. Roosevelt spent two years out West in an attempt to recover, tending cows as a rancher and busting outlaws as a frontier sheriff. In 1886, he returned to New York and married his childhood sweetheart, Edith Kermit Carow. They raised six children, including Roosevelt's daughter from his first marriage. After losing a campaign for mayor, he served as Civil Service commissioner, president of the New York City Police Board, and assistant secretary of the Navy. All the while, he demonstrated honesty in office, upsetting the party bosses who expected him to ignore the law in favor of partisan politics.
War Hero and Vice President
When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, Roosevelt volunteered as commander of the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, known as the Rough Riders, leading a daring charge on San Juan Hill. Returning as a war hero, he became governor of New York and began to exhibit an independence that upset the state's political machine. To stop Roosevelt's reforms, party bosses "kicked him upstairs" to the vice presidency under William McKinley, believing that in this position he would be unable to continue his progressive policies. Roosevelt campaigned vigorously for McKinley in 1900—one commentator remarked, "Tis Teddy alone that's running, an' he ain't a runnin', he's a gallopin'." Roosevelt's efforts helped ensure victory for McKinley. But his time as vice president was brief; McKinley was assassinated in 1901, making Roosevelt the President of the United States.
By the 1904 election, Roosevelt was eager to be elected President in his own right. To achieve this, he knew that he needed to work with Republican Party leaders. He promised to hold back on parts of his progressive agenda in exchange for a free hand in foreign affairs. He also got the reluctant support of wealthy capitalists, who feared his progressive measures, but feared a Democratic victory even more. TR won in a landslide, becoming the first President to be elected after gaining office due to the death of his predecessor. Upon victory, he vowed not to run for another term in 1908, a promise he came to regret.
Modern Presidency
As President, Roosevelt worked to ensure that the government improved the lives of American citizens. His "Square Deal" domestic program reflected the progressive call to reform the American workplace, initiating welfare legislation and government regulation of industry. He was also the nation's first environmentalist President, setting aside nearly 200 million acres for national forests, reserves, and wildlife refuges. In foreign policy, Roosevelt wanted to make the United States a global power by increasing its influence worldwide. He led the effort to secure rights to build the Panama Canal, one of the greatest engineering feats at that time. He also issued his "corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine, which established the United States as the "policeman" of the Western Hemisphere. In addition, he used his position as President to help negotiate peace agreements between belligerent nations, believing that the world should settle international disputes through diplomacy rather than war. Roosevelt is considered the first modern U.S. President because he greatly strengthened the power of the executive branch. He was also an extremely popular President—so popular after leaving office in 1909 that he was able to mount a serious run for the presidency again in 1912. Believing that his successor, William Howard Taft, had failed to continue his program of reform, TR threw his hat into the ring as a candidate for the Progressive Party. Although Roosevelt was defeated by Democrat Woodrow Wilson, his efforts resulted in the creation of one of the most significant third parties in U.S. history. With the onset of World War I in 1914, Roosevelt advocated that the United States prepare itself for war. Accordingly, he was highly critical of Wilson's pledge of neutrality. Once the United States entered the war in 1917, all four of Roosevelt's sons volunteered to serve, which greatly pleased the former President. The death of his youngest son, Quentin, left him deeply distraught. Theodore Roosevelt died less than a year later.
Theodore Roosevelt was born on October 27, 1858, and grew up in New York City, the second of four children. His father, Theodore, Sr., was a well-to-do businessman and philanthropist. His mother, Martha "Mittie" Roosevelt, was a Southerner, raised on a plantation in Georgia. "Teedie" grew up surrounded by the love of his parents and siblings. But he was always a sickly child afflicted with asthma. As a teenager, he decided that he would "make his body," and he undertook a program of gymnastics and weight-lifting, which helped him develop a rugged physique. Thereafter, Roosevelt became a lifelong advocate of exercise and the "strenuous life." He always found time for physical exertions including hiking, riding horses, and swimming. As a young boy, Roosevelt was tutored at home by private teachers. He traveled widely through Europe and the Middle East with his family during the late 1860s and early 1870s, once living with a host family in Germany for five months. In 1876, he entered Harvard College, where he studied a variety of subjects, including German, natural history, zoology, forensics, and composition. He also continued his physical endeavors, taking on boxing and wrestling as new pursuits.
During college, Roosevelt fell in love with Alice Hathaway Lee, a young woman from a prominent New England banking family he met through a friend at Harvard. They were married in October 1880. Roosevelt then enrolled in Columbia Law School, but dropped out after one year to begin a career in public service. He was elected to the New York Assembly and served two terms from 1882 to 1884. A double tragedy struck Roosevelt in 1884. On February 12th, Alice gave birth to a daughter, Alice Lee. Two days later, Roosevelt's mother died of typhoid fever and his wife died of kidney disease within a few hours of each other—and in the same house. For the next few months, a devastated Roosevelt threw himself into political work to escape his grief. Finally, he left his daughter in the care of his sister and fled to the Dakota Badlands. Once out West, Roosevelt soaked in the frontier lifestyle. He bought two ranches and a thousand head of cattle. He flourished in the hardships of the western frontier, riding for days, hunting grizzly bears, herding cows as a rancher, and chasing outlaws as a frontier sheriff. Roosevelt headed back East in 1886; a devastating winter the following year wiped out most of his cattle. Although he would frequent the Dakota Badlands in subsequent years to hunt, he was ready leave the West and return to his former life. One of the reasons he did so was because of a rediscovered love with his childhood sweetheart, Edith Kermit Carow. The two were married in England in 1886 and moved to Oyster Bay, New York, into a house known as Sagamore Hill. In addition to raising Roosevelt's first child, Alice, he and Edith had five children: Theodore, Kermit, Ethel, Archibald, and Quentin.
Renewed Political Spirit
After returning to New York, Roosevelt continued his writing career, which began with the publication of his book, The Naval War of 1812, in 1882. He wrote a number of books during this period, including The Life of Thomas Hart Benton (1887), The Life of Gouverneur Morris (1888), and The Winning of the West (four volumes, 1889-1896). Roosevelt also resumed his political career by running unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City in 1886. In 1888, he campaigned for Republican presidential nominee Benjamin Harrison. When Harrison won the election, he appointed Roosevelt to the U.S. Civil Service Commission. Roosevelt was re-appointed to the Commission by Democratic President Grover Cleveland in 1893. As commissioner, he worked hard to enforce the civil service laws, although he regularly clashed with party regulars and politicians who wanted him to ignore the law in favor of patronage. Roosevelt served dutifully as a commissioner until he accepted the presidency of the New York City Police Board in 1895. He demonstrated honesty in office, much to the displeasure of party bosses. He also cleaned up the corrupt Police Board and strictly enforced laws banning the sale of liquor on the Sabbath.
In 1897, the newly elected Republican President, William McKinley, appointed Roosevelt assistant secretary of the Navy. Roosevelt had long believed in the importance of the Navy and the role it played in national defense. As acting secretary of the Navy, he responded to the explosion of the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898 by putting the Navy on full alert. (See McKinley biography, Foreign Affairs section, for details.) Roosevelt instructed Commodore George Dewey to make ready for war with Spain by taking the necessary steps for bottling up the Spanish squadron in Asian waters. He also asked Dewey to prepare for the probable invasion of the Philippines.
The Rough Riders
When the Spanish-American War began, Roosevelt resigned as assistant secretary of the Navy and volunteered for service as commander the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, a unit known as the Rough Riders—an elite company comprised of Ivy League gentlemen, western cowboys, sheriffs, prospectors, police officers, and Native Americans. Once in Cuba, Roosevelt distinguished himself by leading them on a charge—on foot—up San Juan Hill (actually Kettle Hill) on the outskirts of Santiago. The contingent suffered heavy casualties. The Rough Riders returned to the United States as war heroes. Their varied backgrounds, colorful leader, and bravery on the battlefield brought them considerable attention. Roosevelt personally reveled in his time in the military. He later wrote about his military exploits: "I would rather have led that charge and earned my colonelcy than served three terms in the United States Senate. It makes me feel as though I could now leave something to my children which will serve as an apology for my having existed."
Governor
Roosevelt returned home a war hero and caught the eye of Republican leaders in New York who were looking for a gubernatorial candidate. He agreed to run for governor against a popular Democrat, Judge Augustus van Wyck, the candidate of Tammany Hall. Roosevelt carried the election by just a few thousand votes; his victory stemmed largely from the work of the state's Republican Party boss, Thomas C. Platt, who threw the full support of his political machine behind the hero of San Juan Hill. Although Platt and Roosevelt had agreed to consult each other on matters of policy and patronage, the new governor was his own man. TR steadfastly refused to appoint party regulars as State Insurance Commissioner or Public Works Commissioner—the two most important patronage jobs in the state. When Governor Roosevelt supported a bill for the taxation of the value and assets of public services (gas, water, electric, and streetcars), his actions led to an explosive break with Platt. Almost overnight the insurance companies, the construction contractors, and the privately owned public service corporations realized that all the money they were contributing to Platt's political machine brought them little if any influence with Governor Roosevelt.
Boss Platt knew that something had to be done with the governor before he completely destroyed the Republican state machine. Consulting with Mark Hanna, the top Republican political boss in the nation, Platt conspired to "kick [Roosevelt] upstairs" to the vice presidency in 1900. (Vice President Garret Hobart had just died in office.) This would keep Roosevelt from running for a second term in New York (the governorship was a two-year term in those days). Roosevelt reluctantly agreed, persuaded that the vice presidency might lead to a shot at the White House in 1904. He also knew that the party bosses had rigged the convention, making it nearly impossible for him to avoid being nominated.
1900 Vice Presidential Campaign
The Republican convention nominated TR by acclamation. Thereafter, Roosevelt campaigned furiously for the Republican presidential candidate, William McKinley, matching his Democratic opponents, William Jennings Bryan and Adlai E. Stevenson, move for move. Roosevelt traveled more than 21,000 miles on a special campaign train, making hundreds of speeches, and more than three million people saw him in person. He spoke in 567 cities in twenty-four states. "Tis Tiddy alone that's running," observed Mr. Dooley (a press columnist who used an exaggerated Irish accent to make political observations) "an' he ain't a runnin', he's gallopin'." The Republican ticket overwhelmed the Democrats, racking up an 861,757 vote plurality, the largest Republican victory in years. McKinley won the popular vote of 7.2 million (292 Electoral College votes) to Bryan's 6.3 million (155 Electoral College votes). McKinley won his bid for reelection over Bryan by an even larger margin than he had garnered in 1896.
In September 1901, however, an assassin's bullet killed President McKinley (see McKinley biography, Death of the President section). This tragedy put Theodore Roosevelt ("that damned cowboy"—according to Mark Hanna, the top Republican political boss in the nation) in the White House as the nation's twenty-sixth President. He was the youngest person ever to serve in that capacity. Neither the nation nor the presidency would ever be the same again.
The Campaign and Election of 1904:
After Roosevelt acceded to the presidency in 1901, he soon began to think about how to win election as President in his own right. He realized that although he did not always agree with conservative Republicans in Congress, he needed their support in order to win the nomination in 1904. To that end, he worked out an understanding with legislators, especially Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island, which gave him a free hand in foreign affairs in return for holding back the more progressive items of his domestic agenda. But TR did not refrain from using the executive office to break up monopolies, such as the Northern Securities Company, to mediate in labor disputes between unions and management, as he did in the coal miners' strike in 1902, and to use the White House as a "bully pulpit," from which he lectured the nation on how government should regulate big business. Fearful that his anti-corporate sentiments had soured party bosses, Roosevelt toned down his rhetoric in 1903. Most importantly, he was able to place his people in key party positions and maneuvered Mark Hanna, now the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, to endorse his candidacy several months prior to the 1904 convention. Then TR turned to the public, holding press conferences, launching a national tour of western states that lasted for thirty days, and boldly issuing an executive order that provided pensions for all veterans between the ages of sixty-two and sixty-seven.
With Mark Hanna's untimely death prior to the Republican convention in Chicago, one of Roosevelt's main competitors was gone, making TR's nomination a foregone conclusion. He was nominated unanimously on the first ballot. He picked Senator Charles W. Fairbanks of Indiana—a conservative Republican with close ties to the railroad industry—as his running mate. When the Democrats met in St. Louis, they picked two conservatives, Judge Alton B. Parker, from New York, and eighty-one-year-old Henry G. Davis, a wealthy ex-senator from Virginia and the oldest man to ever run for the vice-presidency. The Democrats, showcasing themselves as the "sane and safe choice," attacked the Roosevelt administration as "spasmodic, erratic, sensational, spectacular, and arbitrary." Republicans touted Roosevelt's record in foreign policy and promised more of the same. Neither Roosevelt nor Parker actively campaigned for the presidency, as was the custom.
Over the summer of 1904, Roosevelt directed the campaign from his front porch at Oyster Bay, issuing lofty statements to his supporters and instructions on strategy to Republican state parties. Roosevelt received a large amount of money for the campaign from wealthy capitalists, such as Edward H. Harriman (the railroad tycoon), Henry C. Frick (the steel baron), and J.P. Morgan (the financial potentate of Wall Street). The wealthy capitalists and their friends contributed more than $2 million to Roosevelt's campaign. They supported Roosevelt because they preferred an "unpredictable head of a predictable party" in power than the "predictable head of an unpredictable party." They might have favored Parker as a person, but the Democrats were simply too populist in their constituency and potentially too radical in their ideas for the conservative business leaders ever to trust.
The election, however, had never been in doubt. TR won 336 electoral votes to Parker's 140. He took every state outside of the South, including Missouri. Roosevelt was immensely popular and rode to a second term on a huge wave of public support, unlike anything the nation had ever seen. After the victory, Roosevelt vowed not to run again for the presidency, believing it was wise to follow the precedent of only serving two terms in office. However, he came to regret that promise in advance of the 1908 election, believing he still had much of his agenda to accomplish. However, he held true to his pledge and supported his chosen successor, William Howard Taft, in 1908.
The Campaign and Election of 1912
Before he left office in 1909, Roosevelt hand-picked William Howard Taft as his successor and worked to get him elected. Taft had served in the Roosevelt administration as governor of the Philippines and secretary of war. During the election, Taft vowed to run the country just as Roosevelt had. But the new administration was off to a rocky start with the outgoing President. After apparently indicating that he would retain most of the existing cabinet members, Taft soon discovered that he would be better served by his own hand-picked secretaries. Roosevelt was miffed at having his cabinet members dismissed and at not being consulted on the new appointments.
After Taft's inauguration, Roosevelt traveled in Africa and Europe for more than a year. He went on safari with his son Kermit, where he acquired more than 3,000 animal trophies, including eight elephants, seven hippos, nine lions, and thirteen rhinos. He then met up with Edith in Egypt, and the two of them journeyed throughout Europe, encountering constant demands to meet and greet royalty and politicians. When the Roosevelts returned to New York in June 1910, they were greeted by one of the largest mass receptions ever given in New York City.
When he first arrived back in the United States, Roosevelt remained noncommittal on the Taft presidency. He wanted time to assess Taft's performance before making any judgments. However, some of his old friends had already brought him negative reports. Gifford Pinchot was so angry with Taft regarding conservation that he had earlier traveled to Italy to meet Roosevelt and discuss the situation. Once TR returned home, he was frequently visited by old friends who decried Taft's supposed efforts to undo his work.
During this period, progressivism was gradually rising from the local and state level to the national level. Increasing numbers of people across the nation supported expanding the role of the federal government to ensure the welfare of the people. Pressured by the progressive wing of the Republican Party to challenge Taft in 1912, Roosevelt weighed his options. Eventually he decided to throw "his hat into the ring" and run against his former protégé.
The Republicans met in Chicago in June 1912, hopelessly split between the Roosevelt progressives and the supporters of President Taft. Roosevelt came to the convention having won a series of preferential primaries that put him ahead of the President in the race for party delegates. Taft, however, controlled the convention floor, and his backers managed to exclude most of the Roosevelt delegates by not recognizing their credentials. These tactics enraged TR, who then refused to allow himself to be nominated, paving the way for Taft to win on the first ballot.
Roosevelt and his supporters abandoned the G.O.P. and reconvened in Chicago two weeks later to form the Progressive Party. They then nominated TR as their presidential candidate with Governor Hiram Johnson of California as his running mate. Roosevelt electrified the convention with a dramatic speech in which he announced that "we stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord." Declaring that he felt "as strong as a Bull Moose," Roosevelt gave the new party its popular name—the Bull Moose Party—and described its party platform as "New Nationalism." Its tenets included political justice and economic opportunity, and it sought a minimum wage for women; an eight-hour workday; a social security system; a national health service; a federal securities commission; and direct election of U.S. senators. The platform also supported the initiative, referendum, and recall as means for the people to exert more direct control over government. TR worried about the power of the minority—often politicians—over the majority and thought these changes would make government more accountable to the people.
The Democrats nominated the reform governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, for President and Thomas R. Marshall, the governor of Indiana, as vice president. Wilson's platform, known as "New Freedom," called for limits on campaign contributions by corporations, tariff reductions, new and stronger antitrust laws, banking and currency reform, a federal income tax, direct election of senators, and a single-term presidency. Although Roosevelt and Wilson were both progressives, they differed over the means and extent to which government should intervene or regulate the states and the economy.
Differences between New Nationalism and New Freedom over trusts and the tariff became a central issue of the campaign. Roosevelt believed the federal government should act as a "trustee" for the American people, controlling and supervising the economy in the public interest. Wilson had greater reservations about a large federal government and sought a return to a more decentralized republic. He argued that if big business were deprived of artificial advantages, such as the protective tariff and monopolies, the natural forces of competition would assure everyone an equal chance at success—thus minimizing the role of government. Whereas Roosevelt differentiated between "good" and "bad" trusts, Wilson suggested that all monopolies were harmful to the nation. Roosevelt's colorful personality helped him overcome the disadvantage of running as a third-party candidate, and he and Wilson contended fiercely for the support of voters interested in reform. Near the end of the campaign, TR dramatized his vitality by insisting on finishing a campaign speech even with an assailant's bullet lodged in his chest. Fortunately, the bullet had been slowed down by the pages of a thick speech he had in his coat pocket, but Roosevelt's courageous—perhaps foolhardy—act reminded Americans of what they loved about him.
Wilson captured 41.9 percent of the vote to Roosevelt's 27.4 percent and Taft's 23.1 percent. Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs won 6 percent of the vote. Despite the divided popular vote, Wilson compiled 435 electoral votes compared to Roosevelt's 88 and Taft's 8. Roosevelt won in six states—California, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Washington. Despite its loss, the strong showing of the Progressive Party signaled the emergence of a significant force in U.S. political history. It also reflected a rising progressive spirit in the United States. Together with Wilson and Debs, Roosevelt had challenged the conservative wing of the Republican Party and left it discredited. In addition, although TR lost the election, much of his New Nationalism program was enacted during Wilson's presidency.
When Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office in September 1901, he presided over a country that had changed significantly in recent decades. The population of the United States had almost doubled from 1870 to 1900 as immigrants came to U.S. cities to work in the country's burgeoning factories. As the United States became increasingly urban and industrial, it acquired many of the attributes common to industrial nations—overcrowded cities, poor working conditions, great economic disparity, and the political dominance of big business. At the turn of the twentieth century, Americans had begun to look for ways to address some of these problems. As chief executive, Roosevelt felt empowered by the people to help ensure social justice and economic opportunity through government regulation. He was not a radical, however; TR believed that big business was a natural part of a maturing economy and, therefore, saw no reason to abolish it. He never suggested fundamentally altering American society or the economy to address various economic and social ills. In fact, he often stated that there must be reform in order to stave off socialism; if government did not act, the people would turn to more extreme measures to seek remedies. In addition, TR was a politician who understood the need to compromise in order to implement his ideas. Coming into office following William McKinley's assassination, Roosevelt pledged to maintain the fallen President's policies so as not to upset the nation in a time of mourning. And even when he began to chart his own course, Roosevelt knew that he had to work with congressional Republicans to get the G.O.P. nomination for President in 1904.
The Great Regulator
One of Roosevelt's central beliefs was that the government had the right to regulate big business to protect the welfare of society. However, this idea was relatively untested. Although Congress had passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, former Presidents had only used it sparingly. So when the Department of Justice filed suit in early 1902 against the Northern Securities Company, it sent shockwaves through the business community. The suit alarmed the business community, which had hoped that Roosevelt would follow precedent and maintain a "hands-off" approach to the market economy. At issue was the claim that the Northern Securities Company—a giant railroad combination created by a syndicate of wealthy industrialists and financiers led by J. P. Morgan—violated the Sherman Antitrust Act because it was a monopoly. In 1904, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government and ordered the company dismantled. The high court's action was a major victory for the administration and put the business community on notice that although this was a Republican administration, it would not give business free rein to operate without regard for the public welfare.
Roosevelt then turned his attention to the nation's railroads, in part because the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) had notified the administration about abuses within the industry. In addition, a large segment of the population supported efforts to regulate the railroads because so many people and businesses were dependent on them. Roosevelt's first achievement in this area was the Elkins Act of 1903, which ended the practice of railroad companies granting shipping rebates to certain companies. The rebates allowed big companies to ship goods for much lower rates than smaller companies could obtain. However, the railroads and big companies were able to undermine the act. Recognizing that the Elkins Act was not effective, Roosevelt pursued further railroad regulation and undertook one of his greatest domestic reform efforts. The legislation, which became known as the Hepburn Act, proposed enhancing the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission to include the ability to regulate shipping rates on railroads. One of the main sticking points of the bill was what role the courts would play in reviewing the rates. Conservative senators who opposed the legislation, acting on behalf of the railroad industry, tried to use judicial review to make the ICC essentially powerless. By giving the courts, which were considered friendly to the railroads, the right to rule on individual cases, the ICC had less power to remedy the inequities of the rates. When Roosevelt encountered this resistance in Congress, he took his case to the people, making a direct appeal on a speaking tour through the West. He succeeded in pressuring the Senate to approve the legislation. The Hepburn Act marked one of the first times a President appealed directly to the people, using the press to help him make his case. The passage of the act was considered a major victory for Roosevelt and highlighted his ability to balance competing interests to achieve his goals.
Square Deal
Roosevelt believed that the government should use its resources to help achieve economic and social justice. When the country faced an anthracite coal shortage in the fall of 1902 because of a strike in Pennsylvania, the President thought he should intervene. As winter approached and heating shortages were imminent, he started to formulate ideas about how he could use the executive office to play a role—even though he did not have any official authority to negotiate an end to the strike. Roosevelt called both the mine owners and the representatives of labor together at the White House. When management refused to negotiate, he hatched a plan to force the two sides to talk: instead of sending federal troops to break the strike and force the miners back to work, TR threatened to use troops to seize the mines and run them as a federal operation. Faced with Roosevelt's plan, the owners and labor unions agreed to submit their cases to a commission and abide by its recommendations. Roosevelt called the settlement of the coal strike a "square deal," inferring that everyone gained fairly from the agreement. That term soon became synonymous with Roosevelt's domestic program. The Square Deal worked to balance competing interests to create a fair deal for all sides: labor and management, consumer and business, developer and conservationist. TR recognized that his program was not perfectly neutral because the government needed to intervene more actively on behalf of the general public to ensure economic opportunity for all. Roosevelt was the first President to name his domestic program and the practice soon became commonplace, with Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, and Harry S. Truman's Fair Deal.
Conservation
Roosevelt was the nation's first conservationist President. Everywhere he went, he preached the need to preserve woodlands and mountain ranges as places of refuge and retreat. He identified the American character with the nation's wilderness regions, believing that our western and frontier heritage had shaped American values, behavior, and culture. The President wanted the United States to change from exploiting natural resources to carefully managing them. He worked with Gifford Pinchot, head of the Forestry Bureau, and Frederick Newell, head of the Reclamation Service, to revolutionize this area of the U.S. government. In 1902, Roosevelt signed the Newlands Reclamation Bill, which used money from federal land sales to build reservoirs and irrigation works to promote agriculture in the arid West. After he won reelection in his own right in 1904, Roosevelt felt more empowered to make significant changes in this domain. Working with Pinchot, he moved the Forest Service from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture. This gave the Forest Service, and Pinchot as head of it, more power to achieve its goals. Together, Roosevelt and Pinchot reduced the role of state and local government in the management of natural resources, a policy that met with considerable resistance. Only the federal government, they argued, had the resources to oversee these efforts. Roosevelt used his presidential authority to issue executive orders to create 150 new national forests, increasing the amount of protected land from 42 million acres to 172 million acres. The President also created five national parks, eighteen national monuments, and 51 wildlife refuges.
Roosevelt and the Muckrakers
The emergence of a mass-circulation independent press at around the turn of the century changed the nature of print media in the United States. Instead of partisan publications that touted a party line, the national media was becoming more independent and more likely to expose scandals and abuses. This era marked the beginning of investigative journalism, and the reporters who led the effort were known as "muckrakers," a term first used by Roosevelt in a 1906 speech. One of the best examples of Roosevelt's relationship with the muckrakers came after he read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which described in lurid detail the filthy conditions in the meat packing industry—where rats, putrid meat, and poisoned rat bait were routinely ground up into sausages. Roosevelt responded by pushing for the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Both pieces of legislation endeared him to the public and to those corporations that favored government regulation as a means of achieving national consumer standards.
Roosevelt was the first President to use the power of the media to appeal directly to the American people. He understood that his forceful personality, his rambunctious family, and his many opinions made good copy for the press. He also knew that the media was a good way for him to reach out to the people, bypassing political parties and political machines. He used the media as a "bully pulpit" to influence public opinion.
On Race and Civil Rights
Theodore Roosevelt reflected the racial attitudes of his time, and his domestic record on race and civil rights was a mixed bag. He did little to preserve black suffrage in the South as those states increasingly disenfranchised blacks. He believed that African Americans as a race were inferior to whites, but he thought many black individuals were superior to white individuals and should be able to prove their merit. He caused a major controversy early in his presidency when he invited Booker T. Washington to dine with him at the White House in October 1901. Roosevelt wanted to talk to Washington about patronage appointments in the South, and he was surprised by the vilification he received in the Southern press; he did not apologize for his actions. Although he appointed blacks to some patronage positions in the South, he was generally unwilling to fight the political battles necessary to win their appointment. One incident in particular taints Roosevelt's reputation on racial issues. In 1906, a small group of black soldiers was accused of going on a shooting spree in Brownsville, Texas, killing one white man and wounding another. Despite conflicting accounts and the lack of physical evidence, the Army assumed the guilt of the black soldiers. When not one of them admitted responsibility, an irritated Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge of three companies of black soldiers (160 men) without a trial. Roosevelt and the white establishment had assumed the soldiers were guilty without affording them the opportunity for a trial to confront their accusers or prove their innocence.