OPINION:
William McKinley doesn’t get the respect he deserves. The nation’s 25th president presided over a powerful pivot point in American history. When he was elected in 1896, America wasn’t an empire. When he was assassinated five years later, after a substantial 1900 re-election victory, America was an empire, with dominance over Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam in the Pacific, and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean. America also established a kind of protectorate over Cuba, although it foreswore any annexation of that strategically located island.
That’s a historically significant accomplishment, irrespective of anyone’s particular view of America’s push toward empire and world influence at the turn of the last century. And yet McKinley today holds hardly any place at all in the nation’s historical consciousness. Commentator Fred Barnes has written that McKinley “was America’s most underrated president.’’ Mr. Barnes may be right.
And now he won’t even have his name attached to that mountain in Alaska, North America’s tallest peak. The New York Times reports that Interior Secretary Sally Jewell has signed a “secretarial order’’ officially changing the name of Mount McKinley. Now it will be known within the federal government as Denali, which The New York Times tells us is its “Koyukon Athabascan’’ name, meaning the name given it centuries ago by Alaska’s original, pre-Caucasian people.
It’s difficult to argue with this action, given that most Alaskans clearly want the mountain to be known by its original, native-tongue name. Indeed, the state changed its own designation back in 1980, when the federal government created the 6 million-acre Denali National Park and Preserve. For years, Alaska lawmakers in Washington had been pushing for the federal government to follow suit. And for years they ran up against their counterparts from Ohio, William McKinley’s home state, who resisted such a slap at a man they regard as a political giant of our heritage.
But now that game is over. Mount McKinley is no more. Denali wins out.
Fine. But let’s take the occasion at least to note the qualities and legacy of the man who once had his name upon that mountain. Just 18 when the Civil War began, he enlisted and became a recognized war hero. Every time he displayed an act of battlefield bravery — and his war record was replete with them — he got another promotion. In four years he rose from private to brevet major.
As a young lawyer in Canton, Ohio, he met and fell in love with Ida Saxton, the belle of the city, a lovely, lively, bright young woman. After they were married, she suffered a number of emotional and physical blows that left her a mere shadow of her former self. Family tragedies left her psychologically brittle. A carriage accident rendered her a partial invalid. She developed epilepsy. Yet McKinley remained totally devoted to her throughout his life; indeed, his solicitous tenderness toward her served as an inspiration for many of his friends and acquaintances.
Though not a man of vision, he possessed a realistic turn of mind that allowed him to see clearly the issues and challenges of his time, and he had the judgment to bring sound decision-making to those issues and challenges.
He sought assiduously to avoid war with Spain even as he put immense pressure on Spanish officials to cease their inhumane treatment of the Cuban people and to find a way to end the bloody war raging against the island insurgency so close to U.S. shores. When war couldn’t be avoided, he pursued it with vigor and success. He kicked Spain out of Cuba and the Caribbean and destroyed its Atlantic fleet; for good measure, he destroyed its Pacific fleet and kicked it out of the Philippines. All this in three months.
Faced with the question of what to do with the Philippines, he applied his characteristic realism: America must have a naval coaling station on the islands; to protect it, we must dominate at least Luzon. But to protect Luzon, we need to take a much larger share of Philippine territory. Finally, to prevent the European powers from carving up the islands, we would have to take the entire archipelago. It was a decision fraught with difficulty and ambiguity, but it was bold and sound, based on American interests.
A similar realism guided him in engineering the annexation of Hawaii, one of the most strategically significant points upon the entire globe. Without it, America’s western defense perimeter would be its Pacific shoreline; by getting Hawaii he pushed that perimeter far out into the Pacific.
A similar realism guided him on economic issues. Though an ardent protectionist his entire life, he realized as president that America’s industrial might and agricultural productivity required global markets for ongoing U.S. economic growth. He fashioned a concept of “reciprocity,’’ meaning we would bring down our tariffs if our trading partners would do likewise. It is what today we call “fair trade.’’ McKinley also presided over a powerful economic recovery following the devastating recession that had gripped the country for four years. And don’t forget his actions setting in motion the building of a U.S.-dominated canal through Central America.
So, OK, strip his name off that mountain. Cast aside, in this instance, the regard we used to have for our national accomplishments and the men who fostered them. But let’s not forget the legacy of this particular president or his service to his country.
• Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington journalist and publishing executive, is the author of books on American history and foreign policy. He currently is working on a biography of William McKinley for Simon & Schuster.
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