Roosevelt took the helm right as America became a world power. He was the perfect president for the new media age. TR’s exploits, from hunting exotic creatures to brokering peace between Russia and Japan, served as perfect fodder for press barons like William Randolph Hearst.
But McKinley was popular in his lifetime, and he built the edifice that TR stood on. His death prompted widespread mourning. McKinley was the only president between Ulysses Grant and Woodrow Wilson—a span of nearly forty years—to be elected to two terms. And his electoral victories over his Democratic opponent, the perennial candidate, William Jennings Bryan, were resounding. In fact, they reshaped the American landscape.
McKinley’s 1896 victory over Bryan is widely regarded as one of a handful of political realignments in U.S. history. Modern Republican strategists like Kevin Phillips, who advised Richard Nixon, to Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s guru, have cited the 1896 realignment as a model—and for good reason. From 1896 until Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932, Republicans occupied the executive branch for all but eight years. The sole Democratic occupant, Woodrow Wilson, only took office thanks to a split in the Republican party created by TR in 1912.
McKinley, Phillips noted, was the “political architect who ended the two-decade national stalemate” that had existed since 1876, “turning a weakened Civil War coalition to a new full-fledged industrial GOP majority,” thereby making him “the most important nineteenth-century Republican after Lincoln.” McKinley remade the GOP, and “he did so by beating, rather than submitting to, the Eastern machine forces.” And, as Phillips observes, McKinley did so by expanding the GOP to include a broader working-class constituency. “Not since Lincoln, who publicly upheld unions…had a Republican nominee so embraced labor.”
McKinley famously embraced tariffs, but he also focused on jobs and employment—“the full dinner pail,” as it was called. By fighting for a conservative working-class party, McKinley was doing what Benjamin Disraeli had done three decades before in the United Kingdom. But while Disraeli is regarded as a seminal figure, McKinley is depicted as an unsophisticated Midwestern rube, his triumphs the fruit of the labor of others.
Indeed, historians have often presented McKinley as incidental to the realignment that he helped forge. They portray wealthy industrialists and key advisers like Mark Hanna as being more responsible for McKinley’s electoral accomplishments. The notion that McKinley was weak and the tool of greater men was pushed by his contemporary enemies and has endured for years afterward. McKinley, of course, wasn’t around to dispute the portrayal.