William McKinley was the tariff king until his last speech changed his mind

On the afternoon of September 5, 1901, President William McKinley stood before a big crowd at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, and gave what turned out to be the last major speech of his life. The world's fair was a celebration of the hemisphere's industry and invention, electric lights and all. And the President, who had spent a quarter century as the face of American protectionism, told the crowd something they might not have expected from him. "The period of exclusiveness is past," he said.

The next day, at a public reception in the Temple of Music on the fairgrounds, an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz shot him twice. McKinley died eight days later, on September 14, 1901. Theodore Roosevelt took the oath that day. And a speech that should have opened a debate was instead read as a final word, a kind of political will.

I want to tell you about it, because the man who wrote the tariff that bears his name ended his career making the case for deals that cut tariffs. Was it a deathbed conversion? A natural evolution? Or had it been in his thinking all along? The answer teaches something about the party he led, and about a debate that still runs through the Republican Party: whether trade should be a wall, a bargaining chip or a road.

The making of a protectionist

William McKinley was born in Niles, Ohio, in 1843. He enlisted in the Union army as a private in 1861 in the 23rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, whose officers included Rutherford B. Hayes, and came out of the war a brevet major. He practiced law in Canton, won a seat in Congress in 1876, and settled into what became a career as the House's leading expert on the tariff.

To understand why, you have to remember what a tariff was in 1880. Before the Sixteenth Amendment made a federal income tax routine in 1913, customs duties were the largest single source of federal revenue. The tariff was how the government paid its bills, and a protective tariff did a second job: it shielded American manufacturers, and the workers they hired, from foreign competitors who paid lower wages.

That second job was the heart of the Republican argument. The party of Lincoln had been the tariff party since the Civil War. The theory went back to Alexander Hamilton's 1791 Report on Manufactures and Henry Clay's American System: a young industrial country would never build factories if cheaper British goods flooded in. By McKinley's day the argument had a moral flavor, too. High wages for American workers were a blessing worth defending, and a tariff protected the high-wage economy from a race to the bottom. For the history of how that became party gospel, see Republicans were the tariff party first, from Lincoln to McKinley and Why the Protective Tariff Was Republican Gospel From Morrill to McKinley.

The McKinley Tariff of 1890

McKinley became chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in 1889, and the bill that bears his name passed Congress in 1890, signed by President Benjamin Harrison on October 1. It raised duties on a wide range of manufactured goods, to levels near fifty percent on many items, and gave some protection to farm products as well. Notice a feature that gets forgotten: it put raw sugar on the free list, to lower prices for households, and paid American sugar growers a bounty from the Treasury instead.

And it did something else. At the urging of Secretary of State James G. Blaine, the law included a reciprocity provision. It put several products that the United States did not produce much of, among them sugar, molasses, coffee, tea and hides, on the free list, but it authorized the President to reimpose duties on those products if the exporting country put unfair duties on American goods. In other words, it was an invitation to bargain. Blaine used it to reach reciprocity agreements with a number of Latin American and Caribbean countries in 1891 and 1892.

Politically, the law was a disaster. Democrats campaigned against it in the midterm elections of 1890, claiming it would raise prices on everything from clothing to household goods, and Republicans took a beating. McKinley himself lost his own seat. He was out of Congress, apparently out of luck, and certainly not the man we remember. But Ohio Republicans elected him governor in 1891 and re-elected him in 1893, and by 1896 he was the leading candidate for the presidency.

1896: the front porch and the money question

The Panic of 1893 had brought a long and painful depression, and the nation's politics had turned on the question of money. William Jennings Bryan, a young Democrat from Nebraska, captured his party's nomination in July 1896 with his "Cross of Gold" speech and a program of free silver. McKinley, who had been a bimetallist in the past, ran on the gold standard and on protection, which he argued would restore prosperity and give factories and mills work.

He ran from his own front porch in Canton, Ohio, receiving delegations that arrived by rail to hear him speak, while Bryan toured the country by train. Standing behind it all was Marcus Alonzo Hanna, a Cleveland businessman and McKinley's close friend, who organized the campaign and raised the money for it on a scale no earlier campaign had matched. McKinley won in November 1896. Hanna was appointed to the Senate from Ohio the following spring.

Once in office, McKinley and a Republican Congress passed the Dingley Tariff, signed July 24, 1897, named for Representative Nelson Dingley of Maine. It raised rates to the highest levels yet seen in the country, and it also carried reciprocity provisions, allowing the President to negotiate agreements with other countries. His negotiator, John A. Kasson, did the work and brought home several treaties. The Senate, which must approve treaties by a two-thirds vote, sat on them and never ratified them. Hold that fact, because it matters later.

Then on March 14, 1900 McKinley signed the Gold Standard Act, which fixed the dollar's value in terms of gold and settled the money question that had divided the country for a generation. He ran again in 1900, again against Bryan, with Theodore Roosevelt as his running mate, and won more comfortably.

The world had changed

In four years the picture around him had changed. The Spanish-American War of 1898 had made the United States an overseas power, with the Philippines and Puerto Rico under its flag, and Hawaii annexed that summer. American factories were producing more than American consumers could buy. The nation that had once feared British competition now found itself exporting steel, oil, machinery and wheat. The home market was no longer the whole game.

This is what the Buffalo speech was about. McKinley praised the country's progress and said that its capacity to produce had grown so much that the problem of finding new markets demanded urgent attention. He observed that commercial wars are unprofitable, that a policy of goodwill and friendly trade relations would prevent reprisals, and that reciprocity treaties were in harmony with the spirit of the times. He argued that America could not keep selling to the world while buying little in return. We should take from our customers, he said in substance, what we can use without harm to our own industries and workers.

Think about what that meant coming from him. This was the author of the 1890 tariff telling the crowd that the era of keeping foreign goods out was over. He had not given up on protection; he said explicitly that the tariff should not be abandoned and that any change should come without injuring the interests of our workers. But he had added a second idea to the first: a country with something to sell needs customers.

Did he change his mind?

Here's where I'd caution against the neat headline, including the one on this post. The record suggests McKinley's thinking evolved over a long time, rather than flipping in a single speech. Reciprocity was already in the 1890 law, which he helped write. It was in the Dingley Act, which he signed. His negotiator spent years on treaties. In that sense the Buffalo speech was the culmination of a direction he had been moving in for more than ten years.

A fair person can read it two ways.

The case that he changed his mind: The McKinley of 1890 spoke of the tariff mainly as a wall for the home market, with a bargaining provision tacked on. The McKinley of 1901 spoke of foreign markets as the pressing problem and of reprisals as folly. The emphasis moved. For a man whose name was a synonym for high tariffs, that is a big shift.

The case that he never did: He never gave up protection, and the bargaining idea was there from the start. What changed was circumstance. When a country that makes little becomes a country that makes everything, the same man will talk about trade differently.

I come down in between. McKinley held two ideas that pull against each other, protect and trade, and the question was always how to balance them as conditions changed. That is not hypocrisy. It's what governing looks like.

What happened to the idea

We will never know what he would have done. He died eight days after being shot, and the reciprocity treaties he wanted were never ratified. Roosevelt, as President, made a reciprocity treaty with Cuba, but he never took on the Senate on the broader program.

The structural problem McKinley's negotiators ran into was the Senate's two-thirds rule for treaties. A tariff deal that has to survive a two-thirds vote can be killed by a minority protecting a single local industry. The solution came decades later, and from the other party. In 1934, in the shadow of the Smoot-Hawley disaster, Congress passed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, which let the President negotiate agreements to cut tariffs by set amounts, without a fresh treaty vote. That statute, pushed by Roosevelt's Secretary of State Cordell Hull, answered McKinley's problem by moving the power to bargain from the Senate to the executive, within limits set by Congress. Modern trade agreements negotiated by Presidents, down to the North American deals described in From the 1989 Canada deal to USMCA, a timeline of North American trade, rest on that idea of delegated authority.

What is a trade deal, in the simplest terms? Let me give you a hypothetical, labeled as such. Suppose our country taxes imported widgets at 40 percent, and the other country taxes our wheat at 20 percent. A reciprocal deal might cut both to 10 percent. On $100 of widgets, our duty falls from $40 to $10. On $100 of wheat, theirs falls from $20 to $10. Each side gets cheaper goods and a wider market. The farmer in the wheat belt benefits, and the widget maker faces more competition. That is the trade-off in a nutshell, and every trade debate in the party since 1901 has been an argument about who is the farmer and who is the widget maker.

Where this leaves a Republican

I can't tell you what the Republican position on trade ought to be, because the party has held three: the wall, the bargain and the open road. free trade, tariffs or managed trade, three theories side by side lays out the three theories fairly. Ronald Reagan, a free-trade man in speeches, imposed quotas and tariffs when he judged American workers were being hurt, as Ronald Reagan was no free-trade purist, and his record proves it shows. Disaster came when the party went too far in one direction, in 1930, and you can read the verdict on that in Smoot-Hawley in 1930 and the Tariff Lesson Republicans Should Know Well.

What McKinley adds is a way to think. Ask of any trade policy:

1. Who pays? A tariff is a tax. Someone at the dock, the shelf or the register pays it. See who really pays a tariff, following the dollar from dock to shelf.
2. Who is protected, and who is the price paid by? The protected worker is visible. The family paying more at the store is not.
3. What do we get in return? A tariff can be a bargaining chip. Does it buy something? Or is it a wall for its own sake?
4. What do the other countries do? Trade has two sides, and retaliation is not hypothetical.
5. Does it cost us friends? Trade is also a tool of foreign policy, which is the point of Trade Is Foreign Policy and Every President Has Treated It That Way.

A man could do worse than use McKinley's own test. He wanted American workers protected and American farmers and factories to have customers. The hard part is the balance.

The bottom line

• McKinley wrote the 1890 tariff and signed the 1897 one. His Buffalo speech of September 5, 1901 said the period of exclusiveness was past. Both are part of his record.
• Do not oversell the conversion. Reciprocity was in his 1890 law and in the Dingley Act. His emphasis changed more than his principles.
• Tariffs were the main federal revenue source before the income tax. When you judge nineteenth-century Republicans, remember what the tariff paid for.
• The Senate's two-thirds rule killed reciprocity. The 1934 Act moved the bargaining power to the President, and modern trade deals rest on that delegation.
• When someone offers you a simple answer on trade, ask the five questions above. If they can't answer them, they're selling a slogan.