It was particularly fortunate to Mr. McKinley and the country that upon entering Congress as a young man he was placed upon the Ways and Means Committee that proved congenial as well as specially adaptable to him. Here, under the tutelage of such chairmen as Kelley and Garfield, it was natural that with his bent he should reach the chairmanship of that great committee himself. It was thus that the opportunity came to him for the exercise of his special genius in tariff matters. His first speech in Congress was on the tariff and his last discussed the same theme.
From the beginning of his public career McKinley was the unfaltering, sturdy, consistent and intelligent advocate of the principle of protection to American industries by tariff duties imposed with the purpose of keeping the cheap labor products of European and Asiatic countries out of our vast and desirable American markets. He was not, as was Garfield, for such protection as would lead to ultimate free trade. He believed that free trade is a dream of theorists, which would bring industrial ruin and poverty to the United States if it were put into practice, benefiting no class but the importing merchants of the seaboard cities. He had no patience with tariffs formed to “afford incidental protection.”
Tariff bills, he thought, should aim primarily at protection, and tariff legislation should be scientific and permanent, with a view to the continuous prosperity of the industrial classes. This was the chief aim of the McKinley bill, passed when he was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. No doubt other minds in both House and Senate helped to frame that measure, but McKinley’s thought and work were on every page of it. When the Republican party was defeated in 1892, largely through public misapprehension of that measure and before it had received a fair trial, McKinley was one of the few Republican leaders who continued to breast the adverse current and who never faltered a moment in the faith that the tide would set back to protection.
Others wanted to change front and abandon the high protection principle. He refused, and proceeded to realign his party on the old line of battle. He set out to educate public sentiment anew, and during his memorable stumping tour of 1894 he made 367 speeches and spoke in the States of Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio. For eight weeks he averaged seven speeches a day, ranging in length from ten minutes to an hour.
In these speeches McKinley addressed himself to the country upon the demerits of the Wilson tariff bill, then on its passage, which had been denounced by President Cleveland, who belonged to the same political party as did its author, and who was of the opposite political party to that of McKinley, as “a product of perfidy and dishonor,” but who permitted it to become a law without his signature. At the same time McKinley spoke in favor of the underlying principle of the act of 1880.
This latter bill, of which McKinley was the father and which bore his name, occupied the entire time of the first session of the Fifty-first Congress, and in all that terrific debate McKinley stood as the special champion of the measure. Its passage was a monument to his ability, patience and endurance, and to his great power as a debater.
By 1884 he had won the title of “Champion of American Protection,” and in 1888 his committee report was delivered, which headed the “Mills Tariff Bill,” and that, with the speech delivered by McKinley at the time, became potent factors in the campaign that followed and in which Harrison was elected President and the political complexion of Congress was changed to one of harmony with the administration.
After his defeat for Congress McKinley remained quietly at his home, where he was again called from its privacy to consider the question of his nomination for the Governorship of Ohio. Governor Campbell had frequently boasted that he had made Ohio a permanent Democratic State, but McKinley dispelled his illusion. The Republican State convention was held at Columbus in June, 1891, and at it William McKinley was nominated Republican candidate for the Governorship, and the following November was elected Governor by 21,000 majority.
It was a typical “campaign of education” that McKinley made at this time and in it he visited eighty-six counties and delivered one hundred and thirty addresses. In all of that arduous campaign, as well as the many others that he made during his political life, McKinley’s speeches were always models of unaffected art. There was never anything that even so much as gave a hint or suggestion of “playing to the gallery.” There were no funny declamations, no pandering to anything or anybody. He stood strong, self-reliant, comfortably poised, well at ease; he spoke with an evenly-modulated and clear voice; his enunciation was distinct and his words short and simple. There was truth in sentences and sincerity in his declarations. Everybody who heard him believed what he said. He had the happy faculty of talking to all manner of persons in a way that commanded respect with awe. He was easily approached—made those who spoke to him feel “at home.” He gave comradeship naturally and commanded perfect respect in such a way that the visitor, the highest or humblest, never felt. Beside his magnetism as a politician and an orator, there was a personal charm about the man that made him as attractive to the many as he was admirable as a leader among his partisans. He won distinction for his uniform courtesy to men and deference to women. He had the same power to win men to him that Napoleon had in making himself the idol of his soldiers. Simple in his tastes, quiet in his manner, firm in his stand for a principle he believed to be right, he was ever the most courteous of men in public life. He made few enemies and held all of his friends. His patience was equal to his physical endurance and he could travel, speak, shake hands all day and yet sit down in the evening and explain to an associate the mysteries or intricacies of a tariff schedule or be a charming companion in a social circle. But in all his sociability there was a purity of speech and thought that made it impossible for even a thoughtless man of rough habits to introduce a suggestion of coarseness, profanity or vulgarity into the conversation.
In all of the trials of his political and official life no moment came when he was not plainly devoted to his invalid wife. All the world loves a noble, true lover, and such McKinley was, tender and gallant to his sweetheart wife, as he ever was before they were married a quarter of a century ago.