Customer Reviews

William McKinley and His America

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I read this bio in my ongoing project of reading a biography on every President. This was an outstanding bio of what seems to be a very underrated man and President.

I didn't know anything about McKinley prior to reading Morgan's book. Other than he was assasinated in Buffalo and helped TR springboard to the Presidency.

I found his life to be very interesting and well detailed. The research was outstanding. The author spent enough time on some of the more laborious subjects such as the gold/silver debate. He also went into detail on the Spanish-American war and the issue in the Phillipines. These were subjects I was very interested in knowing more about and Morgan was sure to detail these which I appreciated.

I think he understood his reader pretty well in this bio. He did a nice job of detailing McKinley's early years and his relationship with friends and family.

As someone that has read a lot of Presidential bios this one was definitely worth reading.

In his "Preface to the Revised Edition," Professor Morgan asserts: "I should emphasize that this is a biography not a history of the period." However, the only disappointing facet of the treatment is that the author provides more background than biography. While he presents a man of character, little in-depth material is offered addressing the roots of that character development and its application in daily non-political affairs.

Perhaps the lacuna in the author's snapshot of the man is due to the paucity of revelatory material and McKinley's reticence to disclose his thoughts on a variety of issues. Perhaps it is a result of McKinley's focus.

Despite this failing, Professor Morgan has offered an insightful narrative, written in a very pleasing style, addressing the ride to eminence of a little-known American leader. Leaving aside the rather mundane discussion of McKinley's tariff and monetary principles, the book crests with the account of the President's foreign policy in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War.

On the whole, McKinley emerges as a great or near-great American figure, a man who consciously fulfilled what he considered his Providential destiny. That desitiny included the unification of American interests in the long-endured wake of the Civil War.

The book is spiced with sufficient anecdotal material (such as the President's resistence to tightened personal security measures in anticipation of his visit to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, the road to assassination, with the words: "Who will attack me?" I haven't an enemy in the world.") to maintain the reader's anticipatory interest.

On the whole, "William McKinley and his America" is an excellent read. It fills a much-needed vacuum in the history of the American Presidency. And - with his last words, "It is God's way. His will, not ours, be done. Nearer My God to Thee," William McKinley revealed himself to posterity as the man of confidence and transcendental awareness that made his Presidential leadership right for the time.

Dr. Morgan is the type historian everyone should have in school. If I had studied history under Dr. Morgan, I might have majored in history rather than engineering. Dr. Morgan makes reading history fun and enlightening. He makes events come to life and makes one feel as if he is witnessing history first-hand.

If not for this book, I might have missed the great contributions of this American President.

This was well-written and full of interesting ideas. It rates among the best of the presidential bios I have read in my project to read a biography of each president in order. (I'm up to TR now.)

William McKinley, like most of his predecessors after Ulysses S Grant administered a presidency that is now bathed in obscurity. Although he died a very popular man, and a highly respected Chief Executive, there are few historians who rank him in the top ten of US Presidents.

And yet, maybe like James Polk, whose Presidency has undergone recent reconsideration, McKinley's legacy should be re-examined.

H. Wayne Morgan authored this book in 1964, and the formality of his writing reflects the scholarly writing style of almost fifty years ago. However, his research is thorough, and his conclusions seem sound. He narrates McKinley's spectacular rise, with the help of Mark Hanna, through the ranks of Ohio politics, to the nation's highest office.

And his coverage of the issues McKinley faced during his Presidency is thorough, exciting and interesting. McKinley was deft in his handling of both Congress and the press. He navigated through crises in both Cuba and the Phillipines, and showed maturity wisdom and restraint in holding back in escalating these conflicts.

Many historians consider his chief accomplishment both putting Theodore Roosevelt on his ticket and dying in office. Yet his Presidency deserves much more consideration and his character and skill is very much underrated.

As with any President whose life was cut short while in office, it is interesting to speculate how history might have changed had McKinley survived his term. Morgan does this to a degree, but would Roosevelt have won the Presidency on his own in 1904, and had he done so, would Taft ever have been President?

Each of our Presidents have left a unique legacy. Morgan does posterity a favor by examining McKinley's. His time in office was a fast moving, eventful and fast changing time. And yet McKinley was not a modern President, nor a throwback to Victorian pollitics.

An enjoyable, important, historic read.

I enjoyed this book. I am reading autobiograpies of presidents, in order, and found this one of the better ones. The length of the book was appropriate to give a thourough background of what made McKinley the man he was and sufficient coverage of the White House years. I came away with a better understanding of him and an opinion that he should be higer on the list of great presidents.