Mckinley, William

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(b. January 29, 1843; d. September 14, 1901) Twenty-fifth president of the United States (1897–1901).

William McKinley served fourteen years in the House of Representatives and two terms as Governor of Ohio before being elected twenty-fifth president of the United States in 1896. In 1901 he was shot by an anarchist and died from his wounds eight days later.

During his term in office McKinley oversaw the transformation of the United States into both a world and an imperial power. He took office in March 1897 a firm believer in peaceful American overseas expansion. The two-year-old Cuban revolution against Spain, however, complicated his hope of achieving this. Since the outbreak of fighting in 1895, congressional and public opinion in support of the revolution had pressed his predecessor Grover Cleveland to take decisive action; and upon becoming president McKinley too felt this pressure. He initially asked the Spanish government to moderate its often brutal tactics for dealing with the Cuban situation, but by early 1898 Spanish reforms had failed to bear fruit.

During the winter of 1898 a series of shocks and a final miscalculation by the president brought about war. The publication of a stolen letter written by the chief Spanish envoy to the United States, Enrique Dupuy de Lome, which implied that Spain would never change its tactics in Cuba and described McKinley as a "bidder for the admiration of the crowd," enflamed public opinion. Within days the nation endured a second shock, and its collective mood turned white-hot with the destruction of the battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor. The following month McKinley took a desperate gamble to avoid war, assuage public opinion, and end the insurrection in Cuba when he demanded that Spain agree to an immediate cease-fire followed by negotiations and eventual Cuban independence. Whereas Spain was amenable to a cease-fire it could not countenance all American demands, especially the call for Cuban independence, and so declared war on the United States on April 23, 1898.

American naval forces largely determined the out-come of the war in two key battles. On May 1 Commodore George Dewey's Pacific Fleet destroyed its Spanish counterpart in Manila Bay. Just over two months later, on July 3, elements of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet destroyed Spanish naval forces in Cuba as they attempted to break the blockade around Santiago Harbor. With victory in Asia and the Caribbean, President McKinley accepted an armistice, which included the cession of Cuba, Guam and Puerto Rico to the United States.

The Administration now faced the critical question of what to do with the territory it had acquired as a result of the armistice. McKinley and Congress had already exposed an expansionist hand when the president introduced a resolution to annex Hawaii, which Congress dutifully approved in July 1898. Guam and Puerto Rico quickly became part of America's burgeoning global empire, while Cuba gained its independence after granting the United States a lease, which it still possesses, on the naval base at Guantanamo Bay.

Possible American acquisition of the Philippines generated heated controversy between the so-called anti-imperialists, who formed the Anti-Imperialist League in November 1898, and a powerful pro-imperial coalition that included McKinley, leading members of the Senate, and future president Theodore Roosevelt. Although the Treaty of Paris, in which Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States for $20 million, still faced a bitter Senate fight, McKinley decided to annex the islands in October 1898. He concluded that the Philippines were not prepared for self-government and that if the United States allowed Philippine independence, the new nation would likely be gobbled up by one of the major imperial powers.

On February 4, 1899, two days before the Senate ratified the Treaty of Paris, American and Philippine forces exchanged fire in Manila, thus beginning the so-called Philippine Insurrection. This war for Philippine independence ended in 1902 with an American victory that cost the United States over 4,000 dead and the Philippines at least 200,000 dead. The Philippines remained an American possession until 1946.

While creating an American empire in the Pacific and Caribbean, McKinley supported traditional anti-imperial American diplomacy in China. Faced with the prospect of China's territorial disintegration in 1899, McKinley reluctantly backed the decision of Secretary of State John Hay to circulate the first Open Door Note to the great powers, which called for equal access to the China market. McKinley acted even more forcefully a year later when he dispatched American troops to join an international relief force headed to Peking to rescue foreigners from the anti-western Boxer rebels. McKinley then backed a second set of Open Door notes that urged the international community not to colonize China. The Open Door notes formed the bedrock of American Far Eastern diplomacy for the next forty years.

Taken as a whole, McKinley's expansionist foreign policy may be seen as a continuation of traditional American manifest destiny ideology. While the American empire had its domestic opponents, a consensus developed by the time of McKinley's election that held that overseas expansion would serve American economic development by securing foreign markets and investment outlets, and that it would enhance internal stability by ending the boom and bust cycle that had characterized the American economy in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This consensus also held that American expansion would benefit those brought under United States control. Although apparently polar opposites, both the conquest of the Philippines and the Open Door for China were manifestations of an ideology that sought markets to conquer, men to civilize, and souls to save.

McKinley brought America onto the world stage. His successor, Theodore Roosevelt, built on McKinley's accomplishments and gave America a leading role to play, especially in the Caribbean and the Far East. A generation later, Theodore's cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, led America in war against Japan in order to defend the American empire and the American principles that reached their apex under William McKinley.

Imperialism; Monuments, Cemeteries, Spanish American War

LaFeber, Walter. The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963.

May, Ernest R. Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power. New York: Harcourt, 1961.

Paterson, Thomas G., Clifford, J. Garry and Hagan, Kenneth J. American Foreign Relations: A History. Vol. 4. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

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