Book Review the Sweet Tempered Imperialist Robert W Merry
Nonfiction
The Get-go Modern President
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PRESIDENT McKINLEY
Architect of the American Century
By Robert W. Merry
Illustrated. 608 pp. Simon & Schuster. $35.
At the plow of the 20th century, America emerged as a global power. The Usa annexed Hawaii and the Philippines, liberated Cuba from Spanish rule, laid the way for the Panama Canal and began to pursue its own form of quasi-benevolent imperialism. In the public imagination, the effigy most prominently associated with this burst of national energy is Theodore Roosevelt. "T.R." charged upwardly San Juan Hill (actually, Kettle Hill) at the head of his Rough Riders, dispatched a naval fleet around the world when he was president and wound up as a face on Mountain Rushmore. William McKinley, the president who actually was responsible for America'due south new role in the earth, is largely overlooked or forgotten.
In his measured, insightful biography, "President McKinley: Architect of the American Century," Robert W. Merry seeks to set the record straight. He notes that the willful, flamboyant Roosevelt upstaged the staid, placid McKinley. Even Roosevelt'south children joked that he wanted to be "the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral," and Roosevelt was not above personal derision. When McKinley seemed to hesitate earlier declaring state of war on Spain in 1898, Roosevelt is said to have suggested, in a individual remark that inevitably became public, that the president'southward courage was "equally soft as a chocolate éclair." (The quip has also been attributed to Firm Speaker Thomas Reed.) In reality, Merry argues, McKinley was shrewd and patient, wily below the bland exterior.
Elected president in 1896, McKinley was beginning his second term when he was assassinated past a deranged agitator in September 1901. He was succeeded in the White Business firm by Roosevelt, who had leveraged his war hero status to become governor of New York, earlier scrambling on the national ticket as McKinley's running mate in 1900. On McKinley'due south watch, the Spanish-American War had already been won and American sway broadened effectually the globe through martial assailment and skillful diplomacy, including the Special Relationship with Britain and the Open Door policy toward China. At the time and even so today, McKinley was regarded as a stolid, amiable figure, but plodding or nearly inert, more or less carried forth by forces he could not or would not control.
It is true that the idea of making the The states a global maritime power, a potential rival to Britain and its Royal Navy, was first pushed past Roosevelt and his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, a senator from Massachusetts, who coined the term "the large policy." Roosevelt wanted to make America a great acquisition nation. In a specially bellicose spoken language to the Naval War College in 1897, he used the word "war" 62 times.
McKinley disliked such swagger. Unlike Roosevelt, he had experienced combat as a immature man. Serving as a quartermaster in the Civil War, McKinley had bravely, if unglamorously, driven a food railroad vehicle through heavy fire to deliver supplies to the troops at Antietam. Though he liked to be called "the Major," he did non boast of his wartime exploits, and at a reunion of old soldiers he in one case wisely observed, "My comrades, the memories of the war are sweeter than service in the war."
At the first of his administration, McKinley had been wary about making Roosevelt assistant secretary of the Navy, the job T.R. coveted as a platform to button for American sea ability. "I desire peace," McKinley told a common acquaintance, "and I am told that your friend Theodore … is always getting into rows with everybody." When Roosevelt, grudgingly elevated to the post by McKinley, and Senator Lodge began agitating for American intervention in Cuba's ongoing revolt against Espana, McKinley remarked, "I take been through one war. I take seen the expressionless piled up; and I do not want to encounter some other."
Nonetheless, McKinley saw that "isolation is no longer possible or desirable" for a rising industrial behemothic in a global economy. America needed new markets and protected trade routes. President McKinley told a friendly congressman, "I suspect that Roosevelt is right, and the only departure between him and me is that mine is the greater responsibleness." Merry persuasively contends that McKinley, working quietly and deliberately, through indirection rather than bombast, guided America not only to liberate Cuba from Espana but also to seize the Philippines and press American interests all the fashion to China. On a fleck of paper, McKinley wrote, "While we are conducting state of war and until its conclusion, we must keep all nosotros go; when the war is over we must keep what we want."
McKinley was not a tub-thumper for national grandeur. He spoke more idealistically about the need to "uplift and civilize" the Filipino people. Non unreasonably, he was attacked at the time past anti-imperialists like Mark Twain for hypocritically grabbing foreign lands while trying to sound like a skillful Christian. Just as Merry notes, it was McKinley who first struck a residuum between projecting power and serving humanitarian ends — between realism and idealism — that would become the guideposts of 20th-century American strange policy.
Elected congressman, governor of Ohio and two-term president, McKinley was a highly skilled politico. A sweetness-tempered human being who forswore conveying grudges, he was loving and incessantly solicitous of his invalided and complaining married woman, Ida. Voters seemed to sense that he was kind and thoughtful. But his magnanimity was studied, and he could be ruthlessly manipulative when he needed to be. With his deep-set eyes and captious manners, McKinley had a "demeanor of heavy quiet," Merry writes in a typically descriptive phrase. The president "had a way of handling men so that they thought his ideas were their ain," said Elihu Root, his secretarial assistant of war. "He cared nothing about the credit, but McKinley always had his mode."
McKinley ended a menstruum of congressional dominance and centralized federal power in the White House, and he transformed presidential politics by methodically building a national base by identifying voters for the Republican Party rather than simply relying on inspirational speeches.
Merry is not alone in seeing McKinley as the first "mod" president, nor does he merits to be. He forthrightly credits Margaret Leech, whose "In the Days of McKinley" was published in the tardily 1950s, besides as more than modern scholars like Lewis Fifty. Gould and H. Wayne Morgan. He might have also pointed to Karl Rove, the Republican political organizer whose volume on the 1896 election, "The Triumph of William McKinley," identified McKinley as a genius at coalition edifice. Merry, a coincidental associate of mine from his days equally a Wall Street Journal reporter, is a veteran observer of Washington politics. McKinley is the second president he has rehabilitated; in 2010, Merry published a respectful volume on James Chiliad. Polk. He brings an erstwhile-schoolhouse dispassion to his piece of work. While inappreciably unopinionated — Merry's "Sands of Empire" (2005) is a sharp set on on the hubris of American interventionism — he has a salubrious respect for the facts, wherever they lead. Like his current subject, Merry is methodical and deliberate, peradventure overly and so, and readers of "President McKinley" may learn more than they wish about Ohio politics in the 1880s.
Clear and thoroughgoing, Merry'south book is a deft character report of a president. It is too a brief for the slow-and-steady school of leadership, a subtle reminder that showboating moralizers can be balanced past grounded and wiser souls.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/17/books/review/robert-w-merry-president-william-mckinley-biography.html
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