William McKinley, 58 years of age, died at 2:15 in the morning. His entire cabinet, save for Theodore Roosevelt, were present.
Two additional telegrams arrived at the remote New York campsite of Theodore Roosevelt yes there were, and even are remote New York campsites, for the Vice President, who had departed McKinley's side when it seemed safe to do so. Less obvious to us now, in the age of Cable News Commentators, there was a feeling at the time that if Roosevelt remained, it indicated that McKinley would die. And also, frankly, in an age when people accepted death as a reality, which we no longer do, even though it still arrives, keeping on, keeping on, often seemed to be the thing to do.
With the telegrams, Roosevelt departed camp at 12:30 in the morning in a buckboard in the middle of a dark, stormy and uncertain night. He switched wagons at the Tarawas Club clubhouse at 2:10 in the morning. He arrived at at North Creek at 5:00 a.m. where he was informed of McKinley's death.
He was darned lucky not to be killed in the journey.
He was sworn in as President at 3:25 in Buffalo.
Roosevelt was 42 years old, the youngest man to ever become President of the United States. That fact is often noted, but worth noting is that McKinley was only 58 years old at the time of his death, young by contemporary standards, ironically enough. Eight U.S. Presidents have been in their 40s when they assumed office. Only two have been in their 70s, with Trump twice being in his 70s. Only ten have been in their 60s, with many being in their 50s. The extreme old age we are currently experiencing is an anomaly, nd not a good one, and one the framers, who would have regarded life beyond 50 years of age as tenuous, did not contemplate. Personally, I'd favor a Constitutional amendment precluding anyone from starting a first term who had obtained the age of 60, save for Vice Presidents who had started their term prior to age 60s. If that was the law now, Ronald Reagan, William Henry Harrison, James Buchanan, George H. W. Bush, Zachary Taylor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Andrew Jackson, and John Adams could not have served as President. If you made that age Ronald Reagan,William Henry Harrison and James Buchanan could not have served, and I'd be fine with that.
McKinley was a pius Methodist who, as noted, forgave his attacker, much to his credit. He regarded the assailant as tragically deluded, which he was.. He had served in the Union Army during the Civil War, which caused him to have a horror of warfare. He was not keen on the developments that swept the country into the Spanish American War, which he did not regard as a moral war, and in fact it was not. He was a lawyer who entered state politics, seeing his rise to governorship of Ohio and later the Presidency. His family was small for the time, as he had only two children, neither of whom survived to adulthood.. His wife was heartbroken by his murder and she died in 1907 at age 59. Massee McKinley, a descendant of President Grover Cleveland, is William McKinley's closest living relative, and resembles him in appearance.
McKinley was a fairly good President, but for a disastrous tariff policy that Donald Trump has oddly cited for proof that tariffs work. In fact, McKinley's tariffs proved disastrous fairly quickly, which he appreciated and sought to redress. The tariffs also angered Canada enormously, which we are repeating. Canadians at the time regarded them as an attempt to subvert their sovereignty and force them into a union with the US, which they did not react well to. As noted, unlike King Donald, he'd experienced war and desperately wanted to avoid war with Spain. And he could recognize a tariff mistake when he saw it.
May the Perpetual Light Shine upon him.
Events, of course, would prove fateful and things took on a life of their own. Roosevelt's ride through the night was dangerous in the extreme, but he was a man who did not eschew danger and he never was. He'd usher in the age of the Imperial Presidency, which he did masterfully and for the public good, but he can and has been criticized for that. His cousin and fellow New Yorker would take that further, and of course New Yorker Donald Trump has taken it to dictatorial and disastrous extremes, perhaps, maybe, bringing it to an end.
Let us hope so.
The law of unintended consequences works enormously here. McKinley was a man of average means who struggled early in his life and rose to great heights based on his character and intelligence, while enduring personal tragedy of an extreme most of us can hardly imagine. He's more like average Americans today than most people, and was more like an average American in his own age. His death brought in a man who was nearly a force of nature, one of the most exceptional Americans to ever live, who was from a well to do family but who represented the best of the common man. His cousin Franklin has been called "a traitor to his class". Now we have a man of wealth who every single one of them would have been horrified by. The MAGA movement is nearly what Theodore Roosevelt worried about and warned about when he was concerned with Socialism, with the radical left and radical right never being very far apart.
As a total aside, there was a time in the country's history in which notable Americans last names were used as first names in certain demographics. Most recently, I've seen that in the use of the the name "Reagan" as a first name. If that was my first name, I'd start going by "Bob", or perhaps Diognetus, but I've seen it, and I once represented a Reagan from an extremely Republican family in a lawsuit. Of note that same family had once been Democrats, prior to the Great Wyoming Political Shift. The use of the name "Roosevelt" had a following in African American families, recognizing what Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt had done for their cause. McKinley had enough of a following that one of the greatest bluesmen of all time had McKinley as a first name, that being McKinley Morgenfeld, born in 1913. He's better known as Muddy Waters.
The Qing Dynasty converted provincial academies into colleges with each to offer a Western world education in addition to Confucian studies.
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