In anticipation of the observance of Presidents’ Day on Monday, Feb. 17, we’ll revisit some of the “behind-the-scenes occurrences” associated with U.S. presidents over time. Today’s focus is on William McKinley of Ohio, the 25th president, who served from 1897-1901.
William McKinley Jr. was born Jan. 29, 1843, in Niles, Ohio, near Youngstown in the northeastern section of the state. He was the seventh of nine children born to William McKinley Sr. and Nancy Allison McKinley.
McKinley was the last president to have served in the Civil War, and after the war, he settled in Canton, Ohio, where he practiced law and married Ida Saxton in 1871. The couple had two daughters who both died as young children. As a result, Ida McKinley descended into a deep depression, and she developed epilepsy around the same time.
McKinley dutifully and faithfully tended to his wife’s medical and emotional needs for the rest of his life.
One of President William McKinley’s greatest accomplishments in the White House from 1896-1901 was to change the role of the vice president…and alter public perception toward the office.
Looking back, the nation’s first vice president was John Adams. He set the tone from the very beginning, calling the vice presidency “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”
In 1840, the great
American orator Daniel Webster (shown below) had an opportunity to become the running mate of
Whig party nominee William Henry Harrison of Berkeley Plantation in Charles
City County, Va.
Webster, of
Salisbury, N.H., turned down the offer, saying, “I do not propose to be buried
until I am dead.”
(In the end, Harrison selected John Tyler, also of Charles City County, Va., as his running mate. They were the winning ticket in the election. Harrison caught pneumonia and died after serving just one month as the ninth U.S. president in 1841.)
At the Republican
convention in 1896, William McKinley, Governor of Ohio, won his party’s nomination
as president, and he was matched up with running mate Garret Augustus Hobart (shown below), a
lawyer who had served in the New Jersey state legislature. Hobart had no
federal government experience, but it didn’t matter to the delegates. One
opined: The office of vice president is considered the “fifth wheel to the
executive coach.”
McKinley won the
election over Democrat William Jennings Bryan. McKinley had been impressed with
Hobart and warmed to him quickly. McKinley consulted with Hobart and delegated
specific projects to his “new best friend.”
McKinley frequently referred to Hobart as “assistant president.” McKinley also leaned on Hobart for “personal financial advice” and routinely turned over a set portion of his monthly presidential salary for Hobart to invest for him.
Hobart had a fatal heart attack in 1899. He was 55 when he died. McKinley chose not to replace Hobart, finishing his first term without a vice president.
McKinley was a
shoo-in to be nominated by Republicans for a second term. His new running mate would
be Theodore Roosevelt of New York City, a whippersnapper who fashioned himself
as a western cowboy. Roosevelt wrestled long and hard with the decision whether
to join the McKinley ticket.
While serving as governor of New York prior to the 1900 Republican convention, Roosevelt even commented to the new media: “I would…rather be anything, say professor of history, than vice president.”
The political theater of this day and age was most intriguing. Roosevelt was encouraged to accept the nomination as vice president by two prominent Republicans who had opposite motives.
U.S. Sen. Thomas C. Platt (shown below) was the “boss of New York Republican politics,” and he felt the charismatic Roosevelt threatened to eat away at his power base. Platt wanted to push Roosevelt out of New York. He determined “the vice presidency seemed like the perfect place to seclude him.” Platt viewed the post of vice president as “a stepping stone into oblivion.”
U.S. Sen. Henry
Cabot Lodge (shown below) from Massachusetts had a dramatically different perspective. He said
the surest way for Roosevelt to become president was to first serve as vice
president. Lodge viewed the job as “a stepping stone to the White House.”
Roosevelt agreed
to go to the party’s convention in 1900. After nominating McKinley as the
party’s choice for president, delegates began chanting: “We want Teddy.” Platt glibly
stated, “Roosevelt might as well stand under Niagara Falls and try to spit
water back as to stop his nomination by this convention.”
And so it was. Roosevelt agreed to become McKinley’s running mate, determined to “make the best of it.”
Because McKinley
had not “warmed up” to Roosevelt like he had to Hobart, the campaign strategy
was to send Roosevelt out to make speeches…as far away from Washington, D.C.,
as possible.
He passed that assignment with flying colors. On the campaign trail, Roosevelt became a “news media darling,” often featured by Finley Peter Dunne, a popular Chicago columnist. He wrote that Roosevelt “ain’t runnin,’ he’s gallopin.’”
Voters
overwhelmingly marked their 1900 ballots for McKinley-Roosevelt rather than the
William Jennings Bryan-Adlai Stevenson ticket.
Roosevelt was 42 when he became vice president. McKinley commented that he felt his new vice president was a tad “impetuous,” so he kept him on a shorter leash than he did Hobart.
Everything changed on Sept. 6, 1901, when McKinley was gunned down by anarchist Leon Czolgosz, in Buffalo, N.Y., at the Pan-American Exposition. McKinley was shot twice in the abdomen by a revolver at close range.
One bullet deflected off a coat button and caused a superficial chest wound. The second bullet entered the president’s stomach. McKinley did not die immediately.
Rushed to the makeshift Pan-American emergency hospital, McKinley was operated on by Dr. Matthew Mann (shown below), a gynecological surgeon and the dean of the University of Buffalo Medical School. Mann happened to be at the expo that day and was the first physician to respond to the scene.
Ironically, one of
the inventions displayed at the Exposition was an X-ray machine; it had been
developed six years earlier, but no one thought to use it – prior to the
operation or later during the recovery – according to Bob McGlincy, who
contributed a recent article to Exhibit City News, a magazine that serves the
tradeshow, event, convention and meeting industry.
When Dr. Mann opened up the president’s abdomen, he could not find any bleeding present behind the pancreas, and he decided to close up the president’s abdomen. (No abdominal drains were put in place, which might have pulled out pooling body fluids that often lead to secondary or post-operative infections.)
Initially, McKinley rallied, but “things went south, however, on Sept. 12, when McKinley was diagnosed with heart failure by Dr. Charles Stockton, an internist and professor of medicine at University of Buffalo. Over the next 48 hours, matters only became graver, early in the morning on Sept. 14, 1901, the president expired.
At the autopsy,
pathologists diagnosed gangrene, or necrosis, of the pancreas and the stomach.
An overwhelming infection and severe fluid loss, leading to heart failure, seemed
to be the likely cause of death.
Roosevelt took the oath of office later on Sept. 14, 1901. Life under Roosevelt would be far different from life under McKinley.
With the benefit of 105 years of hindsight, the History Channel in 2006 selected the assassination of President McKinley as one of its “10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America.” At the time, film project director Joe Berlinger told Reader’s Digest magazine that Roosevelt was “one of the great presidents, but he never would have become president on his own.”
“He was being ‘put out to pasture’ as vice president,” Berlinger said. “If it weren’t for an assassin at precisely that time in American history, Roosevelt never would have become president.
“He had a very sympathetic ear for progressive needs at a time when progressivism was very much needed in this country…and fundamentally changed this country.”
McKinley’s doctors
‘passed’ on using Edison’s X-ray machine
The X-ray machine that was on display at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1901 was designed by Thomas Alva Edison, who was one of America’s premier inventors.
Edison had already
improved on its design and sent his most modern X-ray equipment from his modern
laboratory in West Orange, N.J., to Buffalo to aid physicians who were treating
a gunshot wound suffered by President William McKinley. He was shot in the
abdomen by an assassin while attending the expo on Sept. 6, 1901.
Thomas Edison was born in 1847 in Milan, Ohio, close to Lake Erie and near Sandusky. He grew up in Port Huron, Mich., after the family moved there in 1854. Edison was held in high esteem within the scientific community. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording and motion pictures.
Edison’s inventions, which included the phonograph, the motion picture camera and early versions of the electric light bulb, had a widespread impact on the development of the industrialized world.
He was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of organized science and teamwork to the process of invention, working with many researchers and employees. He established his first industrial research laboratory at Menlo Park, N.J., where Edison was dubbed the “Wizard of Menlo Park.” He and his team quickly outgrew that facility, causing him to establish a sprawling complex of laboratories and factories in West Orange.
These facilities were described as a place of wonderment in the late 19th century. “Edison’s machinery could produce anything from a locomotive engine to a lady’s wristwatch, and the researchers, chemists and technicians in his employ were fondly known as ‘muckers.’”
The fact that Edison wanted to aid in the care and treatment of President McKinley was well-received by the public.
Yet, the physicians tending to McKinley refused to use Edison’s X-ray machine, for “fear of introducing radiation poisoning.” As it was, gangrene set into the wound, and McKinley died on Sept. 14, 1901, with “Edison’s machine sitting nearby unused.”
Once again, Robert Todd Lincoln was on the scene
President William McKinley (shown below) invited Robert Todd Lincoln to attend the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 in Buffalo, N.Y., as his special guest.
By then, the
eldest son of President Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln, born in 1843 in
Springfield, Ill., was a business baron, having avoided being tugged into the
political arena.
After President Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth (shown below) and died on April 14, 1865, Robert Todd Lincoln left Washington to return to Illinois and study law. He was admitted to the Illinois state bar in 1867 and began practicing law in Chicago.
In 1868, Robert Todd Lincoln married Mary Eunice Harlan (shown below) of Mount Pleasant, Iowa. She was a daughter of U.S. Sen. James Harlan of Iowa and his wife, Ann Eliza Peck Harlan. The Lincolns gave birth to three children.
In 1880, Robert Todd Lincoln served as a delegate to the Republican National Convention that nominated James A. Garfield for president. Upon Garfield’s election, the new president appointed Lincoln as his Secretary of War.
Lincoln was an eyewitness to the shooting of President Garfield on July 2, 1881, and took charge in arranging for the assembly of the medical team to treat Garfield’s wounds. Unfortunately, Garfield’s physicians “bungled his care and treatment,” resulting in the president’s death on Sept. 18, 1881.
Lincoln was the only member of Garfield’s cabinet who was asked to continue during the administration of President Chester Arthur, who was Garfield’s vice president. After completing that assignment, Robert Todd Lincoln left Washington in 1885 to once again resume his law practice in Chicago.
In May 1887, the Toledo (Ohio) Blade may have been the first newspaper to advocate that Robert Todd Lincoln be recruited by the Republicans as president or vice president. Historians said: “He repeatedly disavowed any interest in running and stated he would not accept nomination for either position.”
Yet, his supporters continued to strategize ways to get Lincoln to toss his hat in the ring. One was Washington Duke (shown below) of Durham, N.C., the founder of W. Duke and Sons, a tobacco company founded in 1871, which also employed his sons James, Ben and Brodie.
The company
distributed trading cards in 1888, a set of 25 “Presidential Possibilities,” to
promote Duke’s Honest Long Cut Tobacco. Each pack of cigarettes contained a collectible
trading card.
Robert Todd Lincoln was one of the 25. Artwork was created by The Giles Company, a lithography company in New York City.
Lincoln continued
voicing his opposition to nomination all the way up to the Republican
convention in June 1888. Former U.S. Sen. Benjamin Harrison of North Bend, Ohio
(near Cincinnati), finally received the nomination as a compromise candidate.
Harrison (shown below) defeated incumbent Grover Cleveland in the 1888 presidential election and nominated Robert Todd Lincoln to serve as U.S. minister to Great Britain, the most prestigious foreign appointment in the State Department. He accepted that post and served as ambassador from 1889-1993.
Afterward, Lincoln was happy to return to Chicago as general counsel for the Pullman Company, a manufacturer of railroad cars. He succeeded founder George Mortimer Pullman as company president in 1897.
In 1901, the
Lincoln family spent the summer in New Jersey. As they traveled back to Chicago
in early September, they decided to make a stop in Buffalo, to attend the
Pan-American Exposition and visit with President McKinley.
As the Lincolns’ train pulled into the Buffalo train station on the evening of Sept. 6, a Pullman employee was waiting and immediately handed Lincoln a telegram that read: “President McKinley was shot down by an anarchist in Buffalo this afternoon. He was hit twice in the abdomen. Condition serious.”
Robert Todd Lincoln immediately went to the home of John G. Milburn, president of the Pan-American Exposition, where McKinley was resting after a seemingly successful surgery to repair internal damage caused by the assassin’s bullets. Lincoln spent a few minutes with the president and was convinced that McKinley would be fine.
Lincoln saw the president again two days later and still believed he was improving, saying, “My visit has given me great encouragement” for McKinley’s recovery. He and his family left Buffalo for Chicago having enjoyed a visit to the Exposition and glad that McKinley was on the mend.
A week later, McKinley was dead of infection. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt had visited the wounded president at the same time as Robert Todd Lincoln the previous week and then departed for a trip to the Adirondacks in northeastern New York state. Roosevelt hurried back to Buffalo and was sworn in as the 26th president of the United States on Sept. 14, 1901.
Shortly afterward, Lincoln sent President Roosevelt a letter that read in part, “I do not congratulate you, for I have seen too much of the seamy side of the Presidential Robe to think of it as an enviable garment.”
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