You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [44]
Attracted by the interest of the media investigating numerous allegations in self-serving pursuit of the sellable sensationalist copy, a few inner-city reformers and liberal thinkers joined with members of the Republican Party (including William McKinley, Carl Schurz, and Theodore Roosevelt) to upset their uncaring neighbors, unfair employers, and political competitors’ illicit/immoral activities with a nonstop lobbying campaign and venture of investigative exposition. In time they merged with other political elements to form the Progressive Movement. They garnered modest successes in changing the new unbalanced status quo, winning key victories over political corruption and pressing for corrective legislation against the abuses of big business and inadequacies in the American welfare system, but the breakout Republicans had captured one thing more — national prominence.
Although McKinley came to serve as a key leader of peaceful and patriotic reformers, he was by no means an altruist. In embracing the growing interests of small businesses and the working class, the adventurous Republicans found new leverage against several key Democratic machine-run states (including New York’s Tammany Hall machine). Flocking to the banner of their most electable candidate, William McKinley, the Republicans and their newfound allies and admirers successfully courted the general populace. As a result, they were victorious in 1896 over Democratic presidential challenger William Jennings Bryan.
As a former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and past electoral victim of the Democratic Party’s rise to power, William McKinley knew the Republican victory might be short-lived if he failed to unify the country (which ironically meant alienating, if not entirely abandoning, his more liberal-minded reformer allies). Not long after the election, McKinley tried to engineer his forthcoming administration’s future in the form of several anemic domestic and international policies. Deeply rooted in noninterventionism (a popular prospect with voters since the Washington presidency), domestically the president-elect compensated for this fledgling administration’s apparent lack of drive by surrounding himself with famous and influential reformers, including former Lincoln secretary John Hay, federal circuit judge William H. Taft, and Massachusetts power broker and congressman Henry Cabot Lodge.
Still, McKinley’s administration and advisors knew they lacked a certain connectivity with the working class, with the young Republicans, and with the key sector of every major presidential election, the city of New York. If the Republicans were to continue to occupy the political high ground, Taft, Lodge, and others knew they would need to bring forward a personal embodiment of these points and others. After careful consideration, they offered McKinley one name, Theodore Roosevelt.
The son of a semi-affluent New York family, in a few short years Theodore Roosevelt had become popularly recognized as a man of strong convictions and stalwart resolve who eagerly rose to the challenge of a changing world of rapid mechanization, expanding responsibilities, and arresting dangers. Embracing the philosophy of the “strenuous life (growth and strength through the conquest of adversity),” Roosevelt had overcome asthma, excelled as a rancher in the Dakota Territory, written several popular and academic volumes, served the Republican Party, and worked tirelessly as the police commissioner of the City of New York.
While Theodore Roosevelt had made many