Word: mckinleyism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...DAYS OF MCKINLEY (686 pp.)-Margaret Leech-Harper...
...from Mars said, "Take me to your leader" in the days of President McKinley, many an American might have answered, "What leader?" Few U.S. Presidents have exerted so colorless a leadership from the White House, and few have faded so quickly from the nation's memory. In a new biography, Pulitzer Prizewinner Margaret (Reveille in Washington) Leech thoughtfully recalls a President who was widely loved, sincerely devoted to his country and to the Christian virtues, but who remained even in historic moments (as Author Leech puts it) "the captive of caution and indirection." Her biography gives McKinley...
Front-Porch Campaign. McKinley was a Puritan by inheritance. His father, an Ohio pig-iron founder, gave Will's mother the most austere wedding trip imaginable-a drive in the buggy to a nearby spring for a refreshing drink of water (the month was January). The son was as free of vice as he was of intellectual curiosity. Throughout his life, his favorite plays were Rip Van Winkle and The Cricket on the Hearth. Methodist McKinley's only unseemly heritage from the smoke-filled rooms where he started his political career was the habit of smoking an occasional...
...President, McKinley almost always expressed himself in sonorous platitudes, but never did he come closer to stating a political creed than in a speech made when he was running for Governor in 1891: "We cannot gamble with anything so sacred as money" (what he meant was the sacredness of the gold standard). Sitting out the first presidential campaign (on his front porch in Canton, Ohio) against Bryan in 1896, he must have been shocked by the Nebraskan's notion that mankind was being "crucified on a cross of gold." The voters agreed with McKinley, and Author Leech emphasizes what...
...opera as a shooting war could be. Some members of the Cabinet were so incompetent that only blind party loyalty could account for his devotion. His political mentor, Senator Mark Hanna of Ohio, was so obviously the errand boy of the trusts that not even the wildest admirer of McKinley could hope to explain away the President's regard for big business. Yet Author Leech shows McKinley as his own man. If he rooted for the trusts, it was because he believed that business and U.S. destiny were on the same path. If he took the U.S. into...