![[Abridged] Presidential Histories - 25.A.) How William McKinley revolutionized politics, an interview with Christopher McKnight Nichols](https://storage.googleapis.com/goodpods-images-bucket/episode_images/6525cc0e1e417ed39f762f8124d08715bf80d60045828e7dbdde538ee5b7f9b9.avif)
25.A.) How William McKinley revolutionized politics, an interview with Christopher McKnight Nichols
[Abridged] Presidential Histories
01/17/22
•56m
About
Comments
Featured In
When William McKinley ran for president in 1896, he out-raised his opponent 7-to-1, printed more campaign literature than all previous GOP presidential candidates combined, and organized what is often called the first modern presidential campaign. How'd he do it?
Join me as I talk with professor Christopher McKnight Nichols, director of the Oregon State University Center for the Humanities; an expert on the Gilded Age, Progressive Era, World War I, and the 1918 flu pandemic; and author of Promise and Peril, America at the Dawn of the global age, to discuss what made McKinley's 1896 campaign such a game changer and how he pulled it off.
Previous Episode
25.) William McKinley 1897-1901
January 3, 2022
•53m
Once upon a time, the United States stuck to its shores and big business largely stayed out of politics.
Then came William McKinley.
William McKinley took the United States international in a big way, carrying the American flag to Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and China; he revolutionized political campaigning by leveraging the power of big business against a progressive populist threat and building a national campaign that was a quantum leap forward in political organization; and he crafted a international Chinese policy that is a big part of the reason we still have a China on the map, and not some carved up mess of former European colonies like we have in the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas.
Follow along as McKinley serves in the Civil War, enters politics, becomes a champion of big business, rewrites the political playbook in a successful campaign for the presidency, and dives head-first into the modern era of American overseas imperialism, only for his life to be cut short by an assassin driven by the one looming problem McKinley had not solved - the rampant economic inequality of the Gilded Age.
Bibliography
1. The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century – Scott Miller
2. T.R. the last Romantic – H.R. Brands
3. Grover Cleveland – Henry F. Graff
4. Benjamin Harrison – Charles W. Calhoun
5. William Howard Taft – Jeffrey Rosen
Next Episode
25.B.) William McKinley's American Empire, an interview with Robert Merry
February 7, 2022
•41m
How did a country founded by anti-imperial revolutionaries come to own an empire of its own? The answer starts with William McKinley, whose administration exploded onto the international stage by carrying the American flag to Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and China.
Join me as I talk with Robert Merry, a 40-year veteran of Washington journalism and author of five books, including President McKinley: Architect of the American Century, about the arguments for and against McKinley's international actions and the legacy those decisions left behind.
If you like this episode you’ll love
Promoted