For William McKinley, whose presidency bridged the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, and his fellow Republicans, the protective tariff functioned as the central icon in their pantheon. Like Trump, they saw the tariff as an economic cure-all. It not only shielded American businesses from foreign competition, but also safeguarded the wages of industrial workers and funded pensions for veterans. “I am a tariff man,” McKinley declared during his 1896 campaign. "I run on a tariff platform.”
More than anything else, the tariff served a political purpose. It cemented disparate state-level organizations into a potent national coalition. Protection rewarded heavy industry and the regions that supported it: the textile centers of New England, the steel mills and oil refineries of Pennsylvania and Ohio. Special tariff provisions also brought other constituencies, such as Midwestern producers of raw wool, into the Republican fold. Organized labor also worshiped at the altar, finding many of the most protected sectors less hostile to unionization. One union chief, for example, credited the tariff for stable employment and favorable conditions in the glass-workers trade.
And, by liberally spending tariff revenues on pensions for Civil War veterans and their families, the Republican coalition extended far beyond the industrial centers that benefited directly from the high duties. Those expenditures, both on Civil War pensions and on surveying Western lands, managing resources, clearing Native peoples, and protecting white landowners kept Midwestern grain farmers and Western ranchers, who paid higher prices for protected goods and lost access to export markets because of retaliatory tariffs from foreign powers, firmly in the Republican fold.
But for Gilded Age Republicans, the tariff represented much more than a ticket to prosperity. It also formed the foundation of Republican social policy. In their minds, it assured the health of the home and the virtue of young womanhood by sustaining higher wages and abundant employment opportunities that made it possible for men to support their families and women and children to fulfill their domestic roles. “Every woman should be a protectionist,” one GOP broadside proclaimed, because the tariff made “a more self-respecting and womanly life possible.”