William McKinley
William McKinley did not want a war, fought one for ten weeks, and left the United States an imperial power with a colonial insurgency on its hands. He was the last president to have served in the Civil War, enlisting as a private at seventeen, and he came to the presidency as a tariff man - the 1890 tariff bore his name - after a campaign that changed how campaigns are run. His manager raised an unprecedented sum from corporations frightened of his opponent's monetary radicalism and spent it on pamphlets and speakers, while McKinley received delegations on his own porch in Ohio and let the press carry him. The organisation beat the oratory, and the pattern of financed, professionally managed national campaigns dates from it. Cuba had been in revolt against Spain for years, with concentration camps and mass civilian deaths reported daily in newspapers competing for circulation. McKinley pressed Madrid for reform and got most of what he asked; then an American warship blew up in Havana harbour, almost certainly by accident, and public and congressional pressure became irresistible. The war took ten weeks and cost more American lives to disease than to combat. It also produced, almost incidentally, a squadron action in Manila Bay that left the United States holding the Philippines, and McKinley decided after some publicly agonised deliberation to keep them. That decision cost far more than the war. Filipino forces who had been fighting Spain for independence turned on their new occupiers, and the suppression that followed ran for three years, involved torture and concentration camps of its own, and killed perhaps two hundred thousand civilians. Hawaii was annexed in the same year, Puerto Rico and Guam were kept, and the administration announced an open door policy asserting an American commercial interest in China, then sent troops there in 1900. McKinley was re-elected comfortably in 1900 with a running mate the party bosses wanted parked somewhere harmless. In September 1901 an anarchist shot him at an exposition in Buffalo; he died eight days later of gangrene, and the harmless place turned out to be the presidency.
- Lived: 1843 CE – 1901 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
