Word: mckinleyism
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...long after being discharged from the Rough Riders, Roosevelt is elected Governor of New York. During his two years in office, he signs nearly 1,000 bills into law, including one desegregating state schools. After being nominated as McKinley's vice-presidential running mate in 1900, he and McKinley defeat William Jennings Bryan and Adlai Stevenson by fewer than 900,000 votes. On Sept. 6, 1901, six months after taking office, President McKinley is shot while touring the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y. McKinley dies eight days later, and Roosevelt is sworn in as the 26th President. Just...
...good reason--America's business élite was wary of Roosevelt from the start. He turned out to be the first President to aggressively use the powers of government to set rules for the headlong U.S. economy and the men he called "malefactors of great wealth." When President William McKinley chose T.R. as his running mate in 1900, Ohio Senator Mark Hanna, the business-friendly G.O.P. power broker who had engineered McKinley's rise, was horrified. "Don't any of you realize," Hanna raged at fellow Republicans, "there's only one life between this madman and the presidency?" As Governor...
...comparison, McKinley had been everything a robber baron could hope for in a President. He consulted with Wall Street on economic policy, kept tariffs high--they protected American industry but meant higher prices for consumers--and never moved to curb the growth of trusts, the huge enterprises that gathered together smaller companies to form near monopolies. Oil, steel, rubber, copper--one after another, the major sectors of the U.S. economy were becoming dominated by behemoths like John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, which marketed 84% of all the petroleum products in the U.S. As large companies gobbled up smaller ones...
Where was his impact the greatest? Start with the economy. When Roosevelt first came to the presidency, after the assassination of William McKinley, the U.S. was emerging as one of the world's wealthiest nations. It was first in the world in its output of timber, steel, coal, iron. Since 1860 the population had doubled, exports had tripled. But that bounding growth had brought with it all the upheavals of an industrial age--poverty, child labor, dreadful factory conditions. Year after year, workers faced off against bosses with their fists clenched...
...Spanish-American War and its aftermath had placed under U.S. supervision a whole collection of territories and dependencies: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Suddenly, to Roosevelt's utter delight, the U.S. was acting on a world stage, across two oceans. As Assistant Secretary of the Navy under McKinley--a job that should have been nearly meaningless but that he turned into a power center--he had urged on the war. As a Rough Rider, he had fought in it. As President, he would make Americans understand that their new global prominence was a long-term proposition...