Review: President McKinley: Architect of the American Century

Robert W. Merry, President McKinley: Architect of the American Century

President Donald Trump is fascinated with President William McKinley.

I read Robert W. Merry’s book President McKinley: Architect of the American Century because I wanted to get a sense of why Trump is inspired by our America’s 25th president.

In many ways, it would be hard to find two American presidents who differ more in their character and leadership style than Trump and McKinley. McKinley was a Union veteran, a lawyer, a devout Methodist, a devoted husband, an establishment Ohio Republican and a party stalwart. He was the kind of Midwesterner who didn’t travel on the Sabbath. He was more like Mike Pence than Donald Trump. He also defeated the prairie populist William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 and 1900 elections. McKinley was the system candidate that a majority of Americans supported over Bryan’s radicalism.

On the other hand, McKinley was America’s first imperialist president. He was a protectionist who later supported bilateral reciprocal trade agreements. As the architect of the Inner Empire, he broke with his predecessors to project American power into the Caribbean, Central America and the Pacific. He presided over the annexation of Hawaii, Guam and Puerto Rico. It was McKinley who made America an Asian power by acquiring the Philippines. He presided over the first guerilla war and attempt at nation building in the Philippine-American War. He led the first intervention in mainland China during the Boxer Rebellion. He evicted Spain from the Caribbean in the Spanish-American War and began the Great Rapprochement with Great Britain. He signed the Gold Standard Act and supported balancing the budget.

William McKinley was also a Republican, but he wasn’t a Black Republican. The McKinley presidency was a time of segregation, lynchings and a speedy retreat from civil rights. The Wilmington Coup of 1898 occurred during the McKinley presidency, but he didn’t send federal troops to North Carolina. The Spanish-American War cooled sectional tensions and reignited the flame of American nationalism. Ex-Confederates like Joseph Wheeler and Fitzhugh Lee served McKinley as ambassador to Cuba. The country had moved on from the Civil War and Reconstruction to focus on issues like the tariff, the currency, trusts and imperialism. McKinley ran on the message “Prosperity at Home, Prestige Abroad.” It resonated. This generation of Americans wanted to be rich and respected. The country itself wanted the Spanish-American War, not McKinley who yielded to the groundswell of public opinion after the sinking of the Maine.

As an alternative to liberalism, it is easy to see why “national greatness conservatism” would appeal to Trump. America decided in the McKinley years that it wanted to be a Great Power with its own sphere of influence like the other European empires. We were not afraid of throwing our weight around and bullying smaller Third World countries. Americans cared far less about crusading for “human rights” than their own security, status and getting rich. We didn’t have our current “allies” sucking us dry with chronic trade deficits or getting us bogged down in devastating wars where we have no clear national interest like the war in Ukraine. We were wealthy relative to the rest of the world. There was no income tax. “Winners” were rewarded. The turn of the 20th century was also a time of unprecedented innovation.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal? Wouldn’t it be great if we had a trading system which encouraged production and investment in this country? Wouldn’t it be great if we stopped caring about all of this idealistic woke bullshit? Wouldn’t it be great if foreigners paid our taxes? This is why Trump sees McKinley as a role model. There are echoes of the McKinley presidency in Trump’s vision of his second term. Trump’s comfort with business tycoons like Elon Musk is another throwback to how McKinley leaned on the fortunes of Carnegie and Rockefeller to defeat Bryan.

In a different timeline, America could have matured as an industrial colossus and the Great Power of North America, protected by a strong navy in the Atlantic and Pacific, guarded by strategic outposts like Hawaii and Guam. The Caribbean would have been an American lake, the eastern Pacific would have been ours and Latin America would have been our backyard. There were countless interventions there in the first thirty years of the 20th century. After the World Wars, this vision of America with its own sphere of influence was supplanted by “the rules-based international order” of Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. It was their idealistic global liberalism which defined the American Century.

Now that modern liberalism is exhausted and has run its course, where should America go from here? How do you “Make America Great Again”? When was America great? Trump’s answer is that we should revert to this earlier version of America – America after Reconstruction, but before the legacy of Wilson and FDR took root – when Republicans like McKinley, TR, Taft, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover ran the country. It was a time when America’s business was business and mainstream American culture wasn’t too crazy. Warren Harding won the presidency in 1920 by promising a “return to normalcy.” The term “normalcy” was popularized by Harding after two decades of Progressivism exhausted the country.

“A return to normalcy” is what Donald Trump aims to achieve too. He likes to say he runs the party of “common sense.” He is willing to destroy modern liberalism root and branch to get us there. This memory of the past is what motivates MAGA as a uniquely American reactionary movement.

Note: Just as the Third Reich is the lost Golden Age of the “NS” fandom, Trump is inspired by the “winners” of Gilded Age America when New York was at its peak.