This article is a part of our series From Lighthouses to Electric Chargers: A Presidential Series on Transportation Innovations

William McKinley is not generally regarded as one of the nation’s greatest presidents, nor is he acclaimed for significant achievements during his almost five years in the White House. Rather, if remembered at all by current generations, it is because he is one of four presidents assassinated while in office. Nonetheless, his election in 1896 is viewed by historians as a politically significant one: that is, an election that led to a fundamental re-alignment of American politics, and it marked the beginning of one of the most transformational eras of American history.

President William McKinley was not just an incidental bystander to these events, but an important actor in them.

McKinley, a Republican and the last Civil War veteran to be elected president, was a former powerful member of Congress, and the governor of Ohio when he was elected president in 1896. In winning that election, McKinley symbolized the ascendancy of the nation’s private business interests over the forces of agrarian populism, represented by his 1896 opponent, William Jennings Bryant (“You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold,” Bryant had declared, in winning the Democratic Party’s nomination for president that year).

The quarter-century initiated by McKinley’s presidency marked an inflection point in American history. McKinley’s administration, supported by his closest advisor, Ohio businessman and politically powerful Senator Mark Hanna, was in many ways the end of the “Gilded Age” with society and the economy dominated by the birth and growth of large companies and business trusts. McKinley, himself, was most active in economic and financial issues, including questions of tariffs, trade, and monetary stability.

But those years, also, were marked by vast economic and demographic changes – mass immigration, urbanization, and industrialization, and beneath the surface were the beginnings of the Progressive Era, a period of significant political reform, led by President Theodore Roosevelt (who as McKinley’s vice president succeeded McKinley) and later by President Woodrow Wilson.

McKinley’s presidency initiated a period of American imperialism. During the 1898 Spanish-American War, the U.S. exercised its military and naval power on a global scale for the first time in its history. In President McKinley’s message to Congress requesting a declaration of war, he referred to the suffering of the Cuban people and the American property seized and destroyed on the Caribbean island. After ten weeks of fighting, U.S. victory compelled the Spanish to relinquish claims on Cuba and cede control of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.

Painting of a battle in the Philippines. Source: National Museum of the U.S. Navy.

While the McKinley presidency did not see significant specific transportation projects or initiatives, it was very much a period of dominance by railroads, as they expanded and built new right-of-way and facilities throughout the nation. More importantly, during McKinley’s administration railroad companies were the dominant national enterprises, and their power and influence dictated the form of corporations and of general corporate law and structures. Railroads were also most involved in the creation of huge business monopolies, the subject of the first really vigorous anti-trust regulation and litigation under Theodore Roosevelt.

The expansion of the nation’s naval resources during and after the Spanish-American War led to the first significant development of America’s international maritime and naval power. Furthermore, in McKinley’s last public speech before his 1801 assassination, he advocated for a Panama (Isthmian) Canal, rather than the one in Nicaragua favored by Benjamin Harrison. He also called for a major expansion of America’s commercial fleet and a telegraph line between California and Asia.

McKinley said, “We must have more ships. They must be under the American flag, built and manned and owned by Americans. These will not only be profitable in a commercial sense; they will be messengers of peace and amity wherever they go. We must build the Isthmian canal, which will unite the two oceans and give a straight line of water communication with the western coasts of Central and South America and Mexico. The construction of a Pacific cable cannot be longer postponed.”

The foundations for these developments were laid during McKinley’s presidency.