January 29 - Happy Birthday, President McKinley

Key Points

n Postedn on January 29, 2017

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n Williamn McKinley, born in Ohio in 1843, served in the Union Army during then Civil War. He was the last president to have served in that war.

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n Hen became a lawyer, then a Congressman for the Republican Party. He wasn voted out of Congress in a landslide, so he ran for – and won –n two terms as Ohio’s governor. He was elected president in 1896.

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n Then,n as now, everybody wanted America to be a prosperous country, butn various people had various ideas of how to make that happen.n McKinley thought that a protective tariff and keeping to the goldn standard were the ways to build the nation’s economic stability. An protective tariff is an extra tax on things that imported into then country, passed in the hope that costlier goods from other countriesn would make Americans want to buy goods made right here in America.n The gold standard is basing the value of money on a fixed quantityn of gold.

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There was a lot of other stuff happening at the time.n Imperialistic stuff. Imperialism is the attempt to extend a nation’sn power over other countries, generally over more, and more, and evenn more countries, generally through military force. And in the case ofn McKinley, we’re talking about the Spanish-American War of 1898, inn which America backed nearby Cuba against Spain’s rule – but then,n as a part of the peace settlement, the U.S. took over several of Spain’sn colonies. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines all came under U.S.n control. Cuba was promised independence, but the U.S. Army remained in control there for a while as well.

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n We’ren also talking about Hawaii. The U.S. annexed the independent Republic of Hawaii. In other words, the once-independent island group became a U.S. territory.

n Mostn Americans were fine with imperialism, I guess. After all, American was the winner in the Spanish-American War, and it “won” Hawaii.n McKinley won reelection…but six months into that second term, hen was assassinated by a Polish-American anarchist.

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The highest mountain in all of North America
is Alaska’s Denali.

It was dubbed Mount McKinley informally
by a gold prospector in 1896, when William
McKinley ran for president. That name
became official in 1917, sixteen years
after the president’s assassination.

But locals kept calling the mountain what
they’d always called it. In 1975, the Alaskan
state government asked the federal
government to officially rename the
mountain “Denali.”

That didn’t fully happen at the federal level
until 2015.

n Assassinationn tends to make a hero out of a president, and indeed loads of thingsn were named after McKinley.

nHowever, McKinley’s vice-president,n Theodore Roosevelt, ended up outshining McKinley. n

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n Byn the way, note that Guam and Puerto Rico remain U.S. territories, andn Hawaii of course has become a U.S. state. However, Cuba and then Philippines did become fully independent.

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