Most of President McKinley’s appointments were wise; several of the most important ones quite remarkably so. He managed discreetly in crises. He saw the whole of a situation as few statesmen have done, penetrating to details and obscure aspects, which others, even experts, had overlooked. During the Spanish War his advice was always wise and helpful, and at points vital. Courteous to all foreign powers, and falling into no spectacular jangles with any, he was obsequious to none. No other ruler, party to intervention in China during the Boxer rebellion in 1900, acted there so sanely, or withdrew with so creditable a record.
What made it certain that Mr. McKinley’s name would be forever remembered with honor was not merely or mainly the fact that his administration marked a great climacteric in our national career. His intimates in office and in public life unanimously testified that in shaping the nation’s new destiny he played an active and not a passive role. He dominated his cabinet, diligently attending to the advice each member offered, but by no means always following it. Party bosses seeking to lead him were themselves led, oftenest without being aware of it, to accomplish his wishes.
The Home of William McKinley, at Canton, Ohio.
Copyright, 1901, by Underwood & Underwood.
As a practical politician in the better sense of the word McKinley was a master. Repeatedly, at critical junctures, he saved his following from rupture, while the opposition became an impotent rout. Hardly a contrast in American political warfare has been more striking than the pitiful demoralization of the Democracy in the campaign of 1900 compared with the closed ranks and solid front of the Republican array. Anti-imperialists like Carnegie and Hoar, silver men like Senator Stewart, and the low-tariff Republicans of the West united to hold aloft the McKinley banner.
The result was not due, as some fancied, to Mr. Hanna. Nor did it mean that there was no discord among Republicans, for there was much. The discipline proceeded from the candidate’s influence, from his harmonizing personal leadership. This he exercised not through oratory, for he had none of the tricks of speech, not even the knack of story-telling, but by the mere force of his will and his wisdom.
Mr. McKinley’s private character was pure, exemplary, and noble. His life-long devotion to an invalid wife; his fidelity to his friends; the charm, consideration, and tact of his demeanor toward everyone; and, above all, the Christian sublimity of his last days created at once a foundation and a crown for his fame.
Ex-President Cleveland said: “You will constantly hear as accounting for Mr. McKinley’s great success that he was obedient and affectionate as a son, patriotic and faithful as a soldier, honest and upright as a citizen, tender and devoted as a husband, and truthful, generous, unselfish, moral, and clean in every relation of life. He never thought of those things as too weak for his manliness.”
A special grand jury forthwith indicted the assassin, who, talking freely enough with his guards, refused all intercourse with the attorneys assigned to defend him, and with the expert sent to test his sanity. He was promptly placed upon trial, convicted, sentenced, and executed, all without any of the unseemly incidents attending the trial of Guiteau after Garfield’s assassination. No heed was given to those who, some of them from pulpits, fulminated anarchy as bad as that of the anarchists by demanding that Czolgosz be lynched. These prompt but perfectly orderly and dispassionate proceedings were a great credit to the State of New York.
Leon Czolgosz, the murderer of President McKinley, was born in this country, of Russian-Polish parentage, in 1875. He received some education, was apprenticed to a blacksmith in Detroit, and later employed in Cleveland and in Chicago. At the time of his crime he had been working in a Cleveland wire mill. It was said that at Cleveland he had heard Emma Goldman deliver an anarchist address, and that this inspired his fell purpose. It was suspected that he was the tool of an anarchist plot, and that the man preceding him in the line when he shot the President was an accomplice, but there was no evidence that either was true. There were indications that Czolgosz had made overtures to the anarchists and been rejected as a spy. No accessories were found. Nor did the dreadful act betoken that anarchism was increasing in our country, or that any special propagandism in its favor was on. To all appearance, it stood unrelated, so far as America was concerned.