Can We Replay McKinley-ism?

On April 2, President Donald Trump announced a new set of tariffs on actors throughout the global economy, declaring it “Liberation Day” and promising that the policies would be restorative of American manufacturing. The President’s tariff package is no surprise given both his rhetoric throughout the 2024 Presidential campaign and his record during his first administration. However, what has been notable over the last year is the rise of Trump’s late nineteenth century hero in his discourse–President William McKinley, whom Trump has called a “natural businessman” who “made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.”

While the debates over economic theory and ideology tend to take precedence in the modern age, a historical view of McKinley, his strong endorsement of tariffs, and President Donald Trump’s similar embrace suggests two useful parallels. One is the substance of the debates and the rhetoric employed has shifted less than one might expect. The other is that McKinley's tariffs were a political success in the minds of contemporaneous journalists, politicians, and regular Americans.

The tariff was already a major political issue well before McKinley ran for President. In the antebellum, it was the source of great discontent both between North and South and not only the parties- be it Whigs or Republicans against Democrats- but even within the parties themselves. Democrats, for instance, in Pennsylvania during the 1840s split between the pro-tariff faction led by Simon Cameron and the free traders. Cameron, notably, would go on to join the Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet.

President Grover Cleveland, a Southern liberal, pushed hard for tariff reform during his first presidency, believing that the tariff allowed the government to manipulate trade and reward some interests over others, violating his liberal attachment to the principles of limited government and market freedom. Other Democrats connected liberal arguments with the language of anti-monopoly, with one Democratic congressman, Saul Lanham, calling the tariff the “mother of trusts” which concentrated wealth while the “people were sinking lower and lower in want, wretchedness, degradation and squalor.”

Republicans had control of the Fifty-First Congress in 1889-1890, having run nationally on the tariff and opposing the Democratic policy of free trade and lowering the tariff. Until this period, the tariff was understood to be one of “great fundamental principles of the Republican Party.” As historian Richard White puts it, “In pushing for a strengthened tariff, [the Republicans] embraced a newer vision of the United States as an industrial nation, which an active federal government would protect and nurture” and desiring to cultivate the support of the growing anti-monopolist faction in American politics, the “tariff remained the sun around which all the [other policies] revolved.” At the time, McKinley was a rising Republican congressman from Ohio who was the primary sponsor of the Tariff during the 51st Congress as the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.  

McKinley, a decorated volunteer soldier during the American Civil War, came up in the political ranks through the Ohio faction led by Rutherford B. Hayes. McKinley won election to the House from 1877 to 1882 and 1885 to 1891 through the support of Hayes and his mastery of the tariff issue. As the historian Walter LaFeber puts it, tariff debates at the time were “complex, highly statistical, tedious, and of consuming importance for every class of Americans” and it was McKinley who understood that the tariff was “the key to both the creation of immense economic power by great corporations (as in the new steel industry) that could be protected from foreign competition, and also to the unlocking of corporate wealth for the support of ambitious politicians.”

The McKinley tariff was, according to White, the most protectionist in American history, raising duties by an average of 48 percent and protecting not only “infant industries but also industries not yet born,” such as the manufacturing of tinplate. The Republicans argued, with ample support, that the tariff would “raise workers’ wages in the industrial Northeast and Midwest.” Overall rates were the highest in history. From 1870 to 1890, according to the Economic Historians Association, there was incredible growth in manufacturing which allowed for a growing independence from European imports, as industrial output rose by some 296 percent, reaching in 1890 a value of almost $9.4 billion with the nation’s 350,000 industrial firms employing nearly 4,750,000 workers.

Republicans paired the McKinley Tariff with creating tools for expanding agricultural markets abroad, with Secretary of State James Blaine pushing for the power to negotiate reciprocal agreements with foreign countries. Under such agreements, other nations could get favored status and lower duties in return for opening new markets for American goods, especially farm products. The tariff was passed just a month before the 1890 midterm elections. Republicans had to be wary about convincing voters, especially anti-monopolists, that the tariff was not merely a giveaway to corporate industries and monopolies. LaFeber notes that McKinley and Blaine released that many American corporations were so productive that more than protection, they needed help to sell their surplus goods abroad and thus, they placed a reciprocity clause to grant these trading privileges in foreign markets—what LaFaber calls the “centerpiece of twentieth-century U.S. foreign economic policy.”

The key to understanding the divide between the parties in the period over the tariff is the dominant presence in the Democratic Party of the anti-monopolist faction. The anti-monopolist strain was not necessarily limited to the Democrats either, as Alexander McClure, a longtime Republican newspaper editor and state representative, responded to McKinley in 1892 on the tariff question at Philadelphia’s Academic of Music on September 26. One report of the debate wrote dramatically that “McClure flayed McKinley,” referring to the distribution of “protection fat” and the “Jobbery and Robbery of the Monopoly Made Tariff Plan.” In a hall “packed to the doors,” McClure responded to a speech McKinley, now Governor of Ohio, gave to the Manufacturers’ Club in favor of his tariff policy. In a speech filled with Jeffersonian and Jacksonian language once employed to assault the Bank of the United States rhetorically, McClure called the tariff policy a “deliberate fraud” and “deliberate robbery of the great masses of the American people for the benefit of the few” which was born of greed and “subtle hypocrisy.”

During the campaign for the nomination, McKinley supporters were clear that the protective tariff was key to their support. Among the reasons given by supporters to the Chicago Tribune in February 1896 was that McKinley supported the tariff not just for revenue, but “a high protective tariff such as we know McKinley to represent,” with another saying that the high protective tariff was important because it would “put to work laboring men in every shop in the land.” For McKinley supporters, the Democratic Party’s experiments in tariff reform were “disastrous failures,” while McKinley stood for not only the defense of the American worker going back to the Republican Party’s roots but for “American interests, American Labor, American manhood.”

As President, some scholars have suggested that McKinley made missteps with his push for the 1897 Dingley tariff, which did raise tariff walls, but in the words of Walter LaFeber, had a reciprocity provision which “proved too complex and, indeed, too contradictory to be useful,” forcing McKinley to use other tools to make American producers “supreme in world markets.” Critics came to call McKinley’s policy and ideology “McKinleyism.” Defenders of the President, like the Greenfield Vedette and Dade County Advocate, suggested that the McKinley policy was “America first” all the time, one that “never halts, never hesitates, whether the question be the defense of American industries or the defense of American dignity.”

Beyond the protective tariff policy, McKinley and Trump also share a political rhetoric of Americanism, today colloquially and often derisively referred to as “American First”-ism. Supporters of McKinley during the 1896 campaign boasted that McKinely, one of the “great exponents” of that cornerstone of the Republican Party, the protective tariff, had shown himself to be a man who “bravely stands up for the American idea–the American worker and the American home” and the “soldier-statesman” who symbolized American principles and labor through his embrace of protectionism. Like President Trump, McKinley did have both critics of tariff policy within the Republican caucus–the –and tariff-friendly allies who attacked parts of the program. One example that stands out is McKinley’s “warm person friend” Joseph McKenna, who McKinley would name first to his cabinet as Attorney General and then to the Supreme Court in 1897 to replace Justice Stephen Fields. McKenna’s close friendship with McKinley was built in their time serving together in the House before McKenna was nominated and confirmed to the 9th circuit by President Benjamin Harrison in 1892.

Notably, while in Congress together, McKenna had not only voted in support of the McKinley tariff but had been instrumental in its construction as a Ways and Means Committee member. He had, among other things, included provisions in the tariff to protect the budding California wine industry by doubling the tariff on foreign brandy. Yet, McKenna had also opposed parts of the tariff and supported the reformers who objected to the sugar schedule in the tariff bill by offering his own amendment to significantly reduce the rate from 32 to 16 percent. While it failed, Democrats laughed and applauded with delight at McKenna’s dissent.

Yet, while there are notable connections between McKinley's rhetoric and political visions and President Trump's, several important caveats apply to the comparison.

One, significant constitutional questions are yet to be decided and stem from another important change over the last century: the decline of Congress’s role in the American constitutional system and the rise of executive and judicial power in its wake. Congress was and remained the key actor during McKinley’s period. Arguably, one lesson the President could learn is that the most successful tariff policies in the American past had the benefit of not only the proper legislative mandate but the stability and certainty of better-crafted and prescribed law. Today and for decades going back, Congress has delegated away its primacy in crafting the trade and tax policy that is at issue here.

In Congress and the American Tradition, the conservative intellectual James Burnham captured this loss as well as anyone in the modern era. Burnham analyzed how over the course of World War I and II, Congress’s power of the purse fell, and he noted that this decline and the resulting shift “in fiscal control from the legislature to the executive and bureaucracy” was equivalent to the decline in congressional power generally. Burnham exhorted conservatives to remember that it was the liberal position to prefer executive power against Congressional authority, as Conservatives “tended to be for Congress–for Congress as an institution” and the tradition of legislative supremacy, with liberals “inclined to attack and weaken it” when the institutional relations are at issue.

Burnham also clearly states that the Founding Fathers did not hold a laissez-faire view of economics and the state, with the term “general welfare” in Article I referring to the nation’s material prosperity. As Burnham puts it, most of the founders believed “that the protection and fostering or property” was a principle object of society, and it was the duty of government not to operate or take over the economy, but to “improve and expand the opportunities for successful private enterprise.” The key, however, to all such internal improvements, protectionism, and economic intervention is that it was Congress that intervened to advance the public interest.

And, relatedly, the Republican Party, out of its Hamiltonian and Whig Party roots, attached the protective tariff to a more extensive set of policies designed to incubate and foster American prosperity. Today’s Republican Party is no longer attached to the promotion of an “American System.” In particular, an effort to reindustrialize under the historic Whig and Hamiltonian tradition would require a series of legislation for internal improvements.

Finally, the environment of the early Republic through the nineteenth century was a time of an otherwise low tax era in which growth was aided by constant Western expansion and technological change. When McKinley was elected President, Congress had only twice passed an income tax–once during the Civil War as part of the Revenue Acts of 1861 and 1862–which included tariffs on imports–and a second time under the Democratic Wilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894, which reduced tariffs in exchange for a small income tax. That bill was struck down by the Supreme Court in Pollock v. Farmers Loan & Trust in 1895 as an unconstitutional direct tax before the Sixteenth Amendment constitutionalized the income tax, forever altering the size and scope of the federal government.

President Trump, in his belief in the necessity and benefits of tariffs for revenue and protectionism, shares a vision of the American political economy with the tradition of Hamilton, Clay, and President McKinley. Yet, whatever the fruits of that program are, the recent shock and tumult serves as a reminder of the core constitutional prerogatives of Congress that McKinley and Clay also held fast to–if America is to have such a system of tariffs and protection, it should start in the halls of Congress, not with the President’s pen.

Nicholas Mosvick serves as the Buckley Legacy Project Manager for the National Review Institute. He researches American constitutional history of the Civil War Era and is under contract with University of Kansas for his first book, “Legalizing the Draft: Jacksonians, the Civil War and the Constitutionalization of Military Conscription.”