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'Trump has latched on to McKinley because his presidency was at the dawn of the American empire, and that is what Trump loves – the idea that America is destined to dominate the world,' says Robert Merry, a biographer of McKinley.Supplied
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. was the Sporting News’ American League comeback player of the year. Bucket hats and claw clips have made a fashion comeback. Heck, even Donald Trump has come back. But did anyone expect former U.S. president William McKinley to be in the news?
Consistently ranked in the middle range of American presidents, McKinley – who is from Ohio and served in the White House from 1897 to 1901 – is suddenly at centre stage in American politics. Mr. Trump began citing the 25th president in his latest presidential campaign; speaking at a September meeting in Macomb, Mich., he said, “In the 1890s, our country was probably the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs. He was a very good businessman, and he took in billions of dollars at the time. We were a very wealthy country at the time.” In his inaugural address on Jan. 20, he once again called him “a great president” who “made our country very rich through tariffs and talent.”
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Indeed in his first hours back in the White House, Mr. Trump moved to expunge the name “Denali” from North America’s tallest mountain. The Koyukon Athabaskans, indigenous to the area, had used that name for the Alaskan mountain for generations before the government made it official in 2015. Now, Mr. Trump wants to revert to Mount McKinley, its previous name.
Karl Rove, the principal political adviser to former president George W. Bush and the author of a McKinley biography, said in an interview that “Trump clearly was attracted to McKinley as the author of tariff bills in the Gilded Age when tariffs were the principal source of federal revenue.” But, he added, “we have gone past that era.” In The Triumph of William McKinley, Mr. Rove explained that McKinley saw tariffs as a safeguard for American jobs and a way to protect high wages for workers. “For McKinley,” he wrote, “the protective tariff was partly an economic issue of how America could operate in an increasingly global world.”
That is what Mr. Trump argues, but a 2019 Peterson Institute for International Economics study found that in the last year of Mr. Trump’s first administration, his tariff offensive increased the percentage of federal revenues provided by the duties from 1 per cent to a mere 2 per cent.
Mr. Trump’s acquisitive eyes focusing on Greenland, the Panama Canal and, perhaps only jokingly but jarringly nonetheless, on Canada, are a natural match for McKinley’s acquisition of Hawaii, the Philippines and Guam.
“It’s easy to see why Trump has latched on to McKinley because his presidency was at the dawn of the American empire, and that is what Trump loves – the idea that America is destined to dominate the world,” Robert Merry, another McKinley biographer, said. “You can see McKinley in some of the language of the inaugural address – the idea of the country expanding, maybe into Canada. But he’s not anything like McKinley, whose temperament was measured, temperate. Trump is just the opposite of that.”
In President McKinley: Architect of the American Century, Mr. Merry described McKinley as “the country’s leading advocate of high tariffs” and attributed the president’s changing views to a reassessment of global power shifts. “He now saw that America’s thrust into the world and its growing overseas trade rendered obsolete his old philosophical commitment to ‘ultra-protection,’ " he wrote.
Mr. Trump, no scholar of the presidency, clearly understood only half of the McKinley tariff story, missing entirely an essential element germane to his own presidency: that by virtue of the economic and military power the United States possessed, and because of the complexities of interconnected global trade patterns – both factors in contemporary times – McKinley perceived that the blunt instrument of tariffs was outmoded and probably counterproductive.
In his last speech, delivered a day before he was assassinated in Buffalo, he veered sharply from the views of the 47th president. Backtracking on decades of Republican orthodoxy on trade and tariffs, he said, “Reciprocity is the natural outgrowth of our wonderful industrial development under the domestic policy now firmly established.”
His explanation went even further: “What we produce beyond our domestic consumption must have a vent abroad. The excess must be relieved through a foreign outlet and we should sell everywhere we can, and buy wherever the buying will enlarge our sales and productions, and thereby make a greater demand for home labour.”
Those remarks came at the Pan-American Exposition, where McKinley delivered a message of friendship to his hemispheric neighbours that is sharply at odds with his threats to impose 25-per-cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Celebrating the sense of co-operation and friendship at the exposition, he said, “To the Commissioners of the Dominion of Canada and the British colonies, the French colonies, the republics of Mexico and Central and South America and the commissioners of Cuba and Puerto Rico, who share with us in this undertaking, we give the hand of fellowship and felicitate with them upon the triumphs of art, science, education and manufacture which the old has bequeathed to the new century.”
In similar fashion, Mr. Trump may have rushed into the Mount McKinley controversy without understanding firm opinion in Alaska, even among Republicans, with both the state’s GOP senators rushing to oppose the President.
“You can’t improve upon the name that Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascans bestowed on North America’s tallest peak, Denali: the Great One,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski, whose skepticism about the President makes her support especially valuable in a chamber where the GOP majority is slim. “For years, I advocated in Congress to restore the rightful name for this majestic mountain to respect Alaska’s first people who have lived on these lands for thousands of years. This is an issue that should not be re-litigated.”
The peak was named for McKinley, who never visited it, by William Dickey, an Alaska gold prospector who admired the president for his support for the gold standard. It remained that way for 118 years, when it was replaced as part of an effort to honour Indigenous peoples and their language.
“Trump’s act renaming the mountain is ridiculous, pointless political posturing,” said Daniel Nelson, a onetime Alaska mountain guide. “The opportunities taken to restore the proper name to that geographical feature was long overdue, and we still have a lot to do.”