William McKinley (No. 25) - Puerto Rico

February 4-6, 2017

William McKinley (Source:  Smith, 2005)

We’ve reached President #25, William McKinley. But it’s February, and it’s cold.

Granted, not as cold as some years (like last President’s Day when we visited Grover Cleveland’s birthplace in New Jersey in maybe single-digit windchills). But still, it’s not exactly warm.

We could go to Canton, Ohio, home of the William McKinley Presidential Library and Museum. But, like we said, it’s February.

Fortunately, Tom wants to visit a Spanish-American War site for McKinley, since the relatively quick war – dubbed “this splendid little war” – broke out during McKinley’s tenure.

Hello, Puerto Rico! Sunny, balmy, even humid. Eighty-five degrees during the day, mid-70s at night. Water temperature in the Atlantic Ocean around 80. Perfect!

And more importantly, Old San Juan features El Morro – formally called Castillo San Felipe del  Morro – which the American ships shelled in the fight with the Spanish.

Cuba was the instigator of the Spanish-American War, wanting to break off from long-time Spanish rule. And the Cubans really wanted the Americans’ help. Unfortunately for Tom and me, however, the human rights situation in the communist nation is still too appalling for us to justify spending our money there. In fact, it was reported that the Cuban government is diverting the highest quality food to the tourist restaurants, leaving the Cuban people to struggle even more to find food.  And besides, the Castros are obviously not going to hang up any memorials to the U.S.

So off to Puerto Rico we went. It’s an easy four-hour, nonstop flight from BWI. And because it’s a U.S. territory, we don’t need a passport. The taxi drive from the airport to Condado Beach, outside Old San Juan, is a quick, 15-minute trip on a major highway and $20.

After checking into our hotel, we taxied immediately to El Morro to make sure we saw it the first day of our three-day journey. Puerto Rico has a bus system that is super-cheap and apparently easy to use, but we saw a grand total of one bus the entire three-day weekend. So taxi it was. And one tired 3.5-mile walk / slog back to the hotel after dinner.

A good thing to realize about San Juan is that there is A LOT of traffic. So the taxi took a while, since we sat in lines of cars for quite some time. Fortunately, rates are based on where you’re going and not on time. 

El Campo

But when you’re trying to get to the fort two hours before it closes, you want speed! So we got out when we reached El Campo, the huge, expanse of thick green grass where the Spanish Army used to drill in front of the fort. Nowadays, it’s used for picnics and lots of kite flying.  (San Juan is really windy along the Atlantic Ocean – the Trade Winds (Los Vientos ) sweep unencumbered across the Atlantic.  (Tom’s floppy sun hat: useless.)

The spectacular view
from the bathroom.

Construction of the fort started in the 1500s. Overlooking the San Juan harbor and the Atlantic Ocean, the massive, complex fort is six levels with thick, tall stone walls and many garitas, or sentry boxes. It also has a cistern system for water, which is still working.

The views are amazing, even from the bathrooms! This is probably the best view from a public restroom you are ever going to see. Walk past the stalls, under the arch to the balcony, and admire the garita, dark gray rocks and ocean waves below. And maybe a pelican or two winging by.

Also worth noting, there is a path from the harbor past the fort. It’s a lovely walk, and you can see the fort from a different angle – the daunting angle that foreign adversaries confronted as they planned their (usually unsuccessful) attacks.

The formidable walls of El Morro
from the path. around the fort.

Why did Puerto Rico need such a massive fort? Because it is the first island with fresh water that the explorers reached as they sailed from Europe. They could pull into San Juan’s deep harbor and replenish their stocks and then continue on to their newly conquered lands around the Caribbean to plunder for gold and silver and other riches to bring back to the Spanish Crown. So owning Puerto Rico was critical to Spain. The explorers also discovered that the Trade Winds from Africa blew their ships right to Puerto Rico in about 30 days – instead of the 90-120 days it took from Europe – diagonally across the Atlantic with no Trade Winds. It became much more efficient to sail south to Africa and then whip right across the ocean.

Hence, El Morro and a smaller fort a half-mile away on the other side of the channel leading to the harbor. Good luck getting past all those cannons!

Back to the war.

In the late1800s, Spain still held the vestiges of empire.  It ruled Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. The Cubans had been trying to shake the shackles of Spanish rule since the 1860s.  As unrest increased in Cuba, the Spanish government sent several hundred thousand soldiers to Cuba.  The Spanish army led by General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau – known as “The Butcher” – burned crops and moved civilians to “safe” zones to separate them from the militants.  But with poor food and sanitation these zones were really no better than concentration camps.  The American press, which lately had been sensationalizing stories to sell more papers, played up the atrocities.  This was known as Yellow Journalism because the two main sensationalist newspapers:  Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal were printed on yellow paper.  The papers featured thinly sourced articles topped by scare headlines.  But President William McKinley did not want war.

* * *

Known as a pious, righteous and puritanical man (Rauchway, 2003), William McKinley, a former congressman and two-term Ohio governor, became President in 1896 by beating a 36-year-old, rising Democratic congressman named William Jennings Bryan, 271 to 176 electoral votes.  While McKinley campaigned mostly off his porch in Canton, Ohio (he was reported to have given speeches to 750,000 people), Bryan traveled the country giving fiery orations.  Bryan had pushed for a national income tax as well as a loose money policy.  McKinley preferred tariffs to raise money and protect American jobs.  He said, “I am a tariff man standing on a tariff platform.”  (Smith, 2004)   McKinley also pushed for a sound money gold standard rather than the silver coinage pushed by Bryan.  Bryan made one of the most famous speeches in political history in defense of a silver to gold ratio of 16:1.  It is called the “Cross of Gold” speech and was delivered at the Democratic National Convention on July 9, 1896.   Bryan concluded his speech by stating, “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

But McKinley was backed by big political money and the Republicans outspent the Democrats by10 or even 20 times as much (Current, et al., 1975).  McKinley won the election and became the last Civil War soldier to hold the Presidency.  And the Republican majority congress quickly passed tariffs that averaged 57 percent higher. 

***

In February 1898, Spanish Ambassador Dupuy de Lôm wrote a letter that said McKinley was “weak and a bidder for the admiration of the crowd” (Moore, 2007).  This was private correspondence but it made its way into the New York Journal, which didn’t hesitate in printing it.  The story resulted in anti-Spanish feeling.

But McKinley had seen the horrors of the Civil War and did not want a fight.  (He had served as a cook – the soldiers were fond of McKinley because he would bring coffee and food to the front lines.)  McKinley said:  “I have been through one war; I have seen the dead piled up.” (Moore, 2007).

To show strength and also to be prepared to evacuate Americans, McKinley sent the battleship Maine to Cuba.  On February 16, 1898, while the Maine rocked at anchor in Havana Bay, the ship exploded.  286 sailors were killed.  Nobody knew for sure why the blast had occurred.  The newspapers blamed the sinking on the Spanish even though no evidence of Spanish involvement was found. 

Still McKinley persisted with diplomacy.  But the pressure on McKinley was relentless.  “Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain” became a popular patriotic rallying cry.  Teddy Roosevelt, McKinley’s Assistant Secretary of Navy, wanted the U.S. to use force against the Spanish.  Finally on April 11, McKinley asked Congress to declare war on Spain, which it did on April 25.  

And so the war began.  Secretary of State John Hay, once Abraham Lincoln’s young secretary, called it “this splendid little war.”  The New York Journal’s headline asked, “How Do You Like the Journal’s War?” (Bailey, 1958). The war was short with action taking place in the Philippines (Commodore George Dewey defeated Spanish fleet in Manila Bay within five days of the declaration of war), Cuba, and finally Puerto Rico. 

The fight for Puerto Rico began in May 1898 when a fleet under the command of Admiral William Sampson shelled El Morro.  El Morro’s guns returned fire but inflicted only minor damage.  Rough seas made the fleet’s shots go off course and many fell on San Juan.  Total deaths were in the single digits on both sides.

An important note is that El Morro has never been successfully taken by sea. It was taken once by land by the Danish, but they bailed out after hundreds of troops died of dysentery.

In July, the Americans landed on the Caribbean side in Guanica near Ponce and marched through the countryside.  The Americans were joyfully welcomed by the locals. 

The Spanish American war ended with the Treaty of Paris.  Most of the U.S. lives lost were to typhoid (approximately 2,500) and 280 died in battle.

Puerto Rico and Guam came into U.S. possession.  The U.S. bought the Philippines from Spain for $20 million. McKinley justified the purchase of the Philippines by reaching to his religious roots – he reportedly prayed for guidance – and wanting to help the Filipinos. He said, “there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them…”  (Baily, 1958)

And the war was done.

McKinley went on to win re-election in 1900 – again against William Jennings Bryan.  It was an overwhelming victory, 292 to 155, and included the GOP now holding all branches of national government. But his second term would last only seven months.  On September 6, 1901, at the Pan American Exhibit in Buffalo, New York. he came face to face with Leon Czolgos, a 28-year-old self-proclaimed “anarchist.”

Leon Czolgos

Czolgos came out of the ranks of the working-class whites – primarily first- or second-generation immigrants – who worked long hours for low pay.  Poor housing – often crowded tenements –  were the norm.  The concentration of wealth in the United States had increased leaving many poor people.  In 1890, the top 2,000 American families held 9.6 percent of the nation’s wealth, almost triple the amount from 1860 (Lee and Passell, 1979).  The Depression of 1893 had caused high unemployment.  In fact, 800 banks failed during this depression, which was more than any recession or depression except for 1929.  The economy as a whole had improved since the depths of the depression, but the economic gains were not shared by everyone.   It was from this background that the second generation Polish-American anarchist emerged.  The anarchists were people who believed that any organized government was bad.  They believed that government was more likely to exploit than to help people.

Leon did not associate closely with the anarchist movement and only attended a few meetings – yes, we realize that an anarchist meeting is an oxymoron.  Rather than being swayed by the anarchists, Leon was found to have been more strongly influenced by a best-selling utopian novel called Looking Backward, 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy.  This futuristic novel showed how industrial society alienated people.  (The book was a huge best-seller at the time, selling the third largest number of books after Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur.)

Bellamy described 1890s society as a stage coach with a privileged few sitting atop the coach while the rest pulled the coach in lieu of horses.  He described “the desperate straining of the team, their agonized leaping and plunging under the pitiless lashing of hunger, the many who fainted at the rope and were trampled in the mire…”  “At such times the passengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope, exhorting them to patience, and holding out hopes of possible compensation in another world for the hardness of their lot, while others contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled and injured.” 

McKinley giving a speech at the Exposition
the day before he was shot.

http://library.buffalo.edu/pan-am/img/

buffaloaddress.jpg

In the novel, the protagonist awakens in the year 2000 to find a society of equals, where everyone works to the full extent of their capabilities for the same pay.  Because everyone has the same amount of money, there is no crime.  Neither are there wars.  Although it sounded much like Marxism, Bellamy preferred to call it Nationalism.  For a time, Nationalism was very popular and 162 “Bellamy Societies” were created. 

(In his mostly plotless novel, Bellamy cleverly predicted the mega retailer Amazon – except that orders are made and received through a system of pneumatic tubes – as well as a nationalized Spotify-like music service – providing music of the late 1800s through a multi-channel telephone-like system.)

The shooting.

September 21, 1901 issue of Leslie's Weekly

 by T. Dart Walker

In Buffalo, Czolgos waited in line with the other well-wishers at the Pan American Exhibit’s Temple of Music.  He had a gun concealed within a large white bandage wrapped around his right hand.  When it was his turn to greet the President, he pointed his bandaged hand at McKinley’s chest and pulled the trigger twice.

Czolgos was tackled and was unable to get off a third shot. 

McKinley immediately underwent surgery at the Exposition's Emergency Hospital under poor lighting.  The doctor found one bullet but could not locate the bullet in his abdomen, so they sewed him up.  They had learned from the Garfield debacle, not to create needless suffering and introduce possible contamination into a wound by endless probings for a bullet.  However, their antiseptic practices were weak. 

Even so, McKinley was alert the next day.

McKinley gained strength in the days following the shooting and there was optimism.  But sadly, like Garfield, his wound became infected and gangrene developed.  On September 14, he died.

Czolgos’s trial did not take long.  He told the court, "There was no one else but me. No one else told me to do it, and no one paid me to do it."  He was easily found guilty…and sane.  On October 29, he was electrocuted at the penitentiary in Auburn, New York.  Just before the current was turned on, Czologos exclaimed:  "I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people! I did it for the help of the good people, the working men of all countries!"

* * *

Other noteworthy items in the life of William McKinley include:

McKinley was married to Ida Saxton and was a devoted husband.  They had two daughters but both died very young:  one at 3-1/2 years from scarlet fever and one after five months.  Ida was private and sickly and was not often seen.

Following the Spanish American War,  the Americans became mired in a war against the Filipino locals who didn’t take kindly to a new master.  The Filipinos “perceived that they were merely going to exchange Spanish for American overlords, they arose in revolt on February 4, 1899.  In annexing an empire, the United States annexed a war.”  (Baily, 1958).  The U.S. sent 70,000 soldiers to the Philippines.  The Philippine-American War would last into Teddy Roosevelt’s administration.

In China, a group of fanatical Chinese called “Boxers” wanted to push foreigners out of China.  Killings ensued and the foreigners in Peking (today Beijing) retreated to their embassies.  An 18,000-strong international rescue force—including 2,500 American troops—was sent to rescue foreigners trapped by the Boxer Rebellion.

Unlike Grover Cleveland, William McKinley supported annexation of Hawaii.  Hawaii proved to be a valuable stopover for the U.S. Navy during transit to the Philippines.  In the summer of 1898, McKinley signed a bill annexing Hawaii.

McKinley’s piousness did not extend to helping African Americans.  Jim Crow America of the 1890s was not a friendly place to be if you were black.  A lynching took place somewhere in the United States – mostly, but not exclusively, in the South – on average once every three days.   Participation of eligible black Americans in the voting process fell from 85 percent during Reconstruction (1865-1876) to less than 10 percent in the 1890s – much of this the result of the populism of the time and the resulting repression of blacks.  Although he once dined with Booker T. Washington, McKinley did nothing for African Americans.  He did not speak out against lynching but rather asked blacks to be patient with reforms.

Directions

Castillo San Felipe del  Morro is located on the west side of Old San Juan.  It is operated by the National Park Service and the entrance fee is $5.

References

Baily, T.  1958.  A Diplomatic History of the American People.  Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc.  New York, NY.

Bellamy, E.  1888.  Looking Backward:  2000-1887. 

Freidel, Frank.  1958.  The Splendid Little War.  Little, Brown and Company.  Boston.

KIngseed, W. 2001. 

http://www.historynet.com/president-william-mckinley-assassinated-by-an-anarchist.htm 

Lee, S.P. and P. Passell.  1979.  A New Economic View of American History.  W.W. Norton & Company.  New York, NY.

Moore, K.  2007.  The American President.  Fall River Press.  New York, New York.

Music at the White House:  Army Navy Reception, 1900.  2010.  The White House Historical Association.

Rauchway, E.  2003.  Murdering McKinley:  The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America.  Hill and Want, New York, NY.

Riccards, M.P.  1995.  The Ferocious Engine of Democracy.  Madison Books.  Lanham, MD

Smith, C.  2004.  Presidents: Every Question Answered.  Hylas Publishing.  New York, NY.

Videos

History Channel.  2005.  The Presidents:  The Lives and Legacies of the 43 Leaders of the United States.

Websites

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_San_Juan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii#Overthrow_of_1893_.E2.80.93_the_Republic_of_Hawaii_.281894.E2.80.931898.29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Backward

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5354/

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1899-1913/hay-and-china

http://library.buffalo.edu/pan-am/exposition/law/mckinley.html

http://www.buffalohistoryworks.com/panamex/assassination/executon.htm

http://www.firstladies.org/biographies/firstladies.aspx?biography=25

https://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/chronpr.html

https://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/intro.html

https://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/weyler.html

http://www.ushistory.org/us/44b.asp

http://www.ushistory.org/us/44c.asp