In the Days of McKinley

Margaret Leech's biography follows William McKinley from his rise as an Ohio congressman and governor to the presidency he won in 1896, then spends most of its length inside the four and a half eventful years he actually served. Leech covers the Spanish American War of 1898, fought after McKinley failed to resolve Cuba's independence crisis through diplomacy, and the war's swift outcome: Spain's surrender of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, alongside the American annexation of Hawaii that same year. She follows the debates that came with sudden overseas empire, the drawn out rebellion against American rule in the Philippines, and McKinley's Open Door policy toward China, set against the domestic politics of the era, including the protective Dingley Tariff of 1897 and the Gold Standard Act of 1900 that closed the long fight over silver and gold.

Leech gives full weight to the assassination that ended it all, when the anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot McKinley at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo on September 6, 1901; McKinley lingered eight days before dying of gangrene from the wound, and Theodore Roosevelt succeeded him. Leech, who had already spent a career writing for magazines and in advertising before turning to history, builds the book from close period detail, the White House routines and the society and mood of Washington around 1900, rather than treating McKinley as a distant figure of policy alone.

Reading the book means meeting a McKinley Leech clearly finds more sympathetic than his usual reputation as a passive, tariff bound politician allowed, a president she presents as more capable and more attractive than earlier accounts suggested. It suits a reader who wants the turn of the century captured in close, readable detail rather than a strictly political account of an administration usually remembered only for the war and the assassination that bracket it.