A President Remembered

IN THE DAYS OF MCKINLEY (686 pp.)--Margaret Leech--Harper ($7.50).

Had the man 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 his due and his comeuppance too. If he remains as short of color as ever, he will at least be better understood.

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 stogie (he chewed, too, while Governor of Ohio, and his spittoon aim was fine).

As 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 is really at the heart of the McKinley story: this hymn-loving, humanity-loving man of the people was as much the favorite of the wage earners as he was the darling of the millionaire industrialists.

Blind Loyalty. He hated war (he went from private to major in the Civil War), but took Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in a war that was as close to comic 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 war and a great-power role, it was because he knew that the hour had struck for isolationism.

The manner of his death was typical of his gentle nature. After he was shot by an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y., his first thought was of his wife: "Be careful how you tell her." He died eight days later, whispering to his wife: "Nearer, my God, to thee." It was Sept. 14, 1901; McKinley was leaving a violent century that he could not have understood, and that could not be very kind to him in retrospect. At the time, his mourners did not recall his failures but remembered his "firm, unquestioning faith; his kindly, frock-coated dignity; his accessibility and dedication to the people: the federal simplicity that would not be seen again in Washington." A popular ballad put it this way:

Mister McKinley, he ain't done no wrong But Sholgosh he shot him with an Ivor-Johnson gun For to lay him down boys, to lay him down.

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