In his inaugural address President Trump called President William McKinley (1897-1901) “great” and proudly announced that he had changed the name of Mount Denali in Alaska back to Mount McKinley. The reason the president picked McKinley of all past presidents to heap praise upon is that McKinley was a lifelong political tool of big business, primarily Northern state manufacturers who championed protectionist tariff taxes so rabidly that he was called “the apostle of protectionism” and “the Napoleon of protectionism.”
President Trump’s election is said to be a “populist” victory against the deep state establishment, but there is nothing more anti-populist than protectionist tariff taxes. Protectionist tariff taxes are nothing more than a price-fixing conspiracy orchestrated by the state that enriches a relatively small group of politically connected corporations (and their unions) by plundering their consumers with higher prices. After all, if it is possible to use tariffs to force foreigners to pay a county’s taxes, every government on earth would be doing it. Yet President Trump apparently believes that he has discovered some kind of holy grail of economics that proves you can get something for nothing after all.
A Trump staffer or speech writer must have run across the book William McKinley: Apostle of Protectionism by Quentin R. Skrabec. The book explains how the admitted economic ignoramus William McKinley became the political heir to the corrupt Hamiltonian “American System” of corporate welfare, protectionist tariff tax plunder, and central banking. (His predecessors in that regard were Hamilton himself, replaced by Henry Clay, who was in turn replaced by Lincoln).
Skrabec’s book is full of over-the-top praise for McKinley, at one point comparing him to the Apostle Paul who would “spread the gospel of American protectionism.” Like McKinley, Skrabec is from Pennsylvania and Ohio iron and steel industry country, which perhaps explains his bromance with the 25th president.
Skrabec explains that McKinley never formally studied economics, by his own admission, but “learned his economics as an army supply officer” in Lincoln’s army. He also supposedly stayed up many nights “studying statistics” in order to make his case for protectionist tariffs. “McKinley was self-educated for the most part,” he writes. With that kind of “education” McKinley later in life became a congressional advocate of “national industrial planning,” several decades before the Soviets made it popular. This is a good example of the kind of societal disasters that can be created by economic ignorance on the part of people who have gained political power.
At times Skrabec’s book is monotonously foolish, blaming all good economic news on protectionism and all bad economic news on too much competition. For example, without even mentioning the existence of the Second Bank of the United States, a precursor of the Fed, he blames the Panic of 1819, the subject of Murray Rothbard’s doctoral dissertation, on too much foreign competition in early manufacturing. He does the same in his treatment of the Panic of 1837.
When McKinley entered Congress in 1877 he “completely rejected the fashionable theories of Adam Smith,” writes Skrabec. Of course, it was the mercantilist superstitions of Pennsylvania steel industry publicist and propagandist Henry Carey, who McKinley often cited, that were truly “fashionable” and flaky. Comparing Carey to Adam Smith is like comparing the brain of Einstein to that of a one-year old child. McKinley once boasted that “I would rather have my political economy founded upon the everyday experience of a . . . farmer and factory hand than the learning of the professor.”
McKinley must have been the life of every party in Washington, D.C., for he “loved to speak to anybody that would listen about the role of protectionism.” Today’s D.C. party scene must be just like this whenever President Trump is in attendance.
McKinley is said to have been the congressional protégé of one “Pig Iron Kelly,” an equally uneducated iron industry politician who was an ardent protectionist because – surprise! – he was a pig iron manufacturer who wanted to eliminate all foreign competition so that he could better plunder his customers – and make American manufacturers of products made with pig iron less competitive in international markets, by the way.
The efforts of McKinley and other congressional protectionists, mostly from the Republican party, culminated in the McKinley Tariff of 1890 which was so disastrous politically that the Democrats took over both houses of Congress and the White House. McKinley himself was voted out of office and the Democrats gained a three-to-one advantage in the House. Yet Skrabec boasts that the McKinley tariff bill was “extremely well researched and used science and statistics to apply the tariff rates.” Talk of “scientific tariff rates” appears all throughout the book, but there is no definition of it. It apparently means that the highest rates were placed on products whose producers had the most political clout and resources with which to bribe members of Congress to vote to protect them from competition. It was certainly not based on economic science.
The McKinley Tariff caused skyrocketing prices in the most heavily taxed products, many of which were inputs into the production of other “final goods,” as economists call them. The cost of these goods spiked, making those American manufacturers less competitive in international markets -- and in domestic markets as well where there were substitute goods. For example, according to Frank Taussig’s The Tariff History of the United States, the tariff tax on carpet wool was increased by 50 percent. Carpets of course then became more expense. Hemp and flax tariffs were increased by as much as 100 percent, which of course increased the cost of anything made with hemp.
A tool of the Rockefeller political machine (Rockefeller ran Standard Oil from his Cleveland, Ohio office), McKinley’s political career was salvaged when the machine got him elected governor of Ohio and then president in 1896. Skrabec correctly observed that the Republican party by that time stood for imperialism, emboldened by its conquest of the South and its campaign of genocide against the Plains Indians from 1865-1890. “The idea of expansion and imperialism had deep roots in the Republican party,” writes Skrabec. Among the “fathers” of this movement, he writes, was John Hay, Lincoln’s personal secretary who later became secretary of state under McKinley.
During the McKinley administration Hawaii was annexed literally at bayonet point as the king of Hawaii was forced to sign “the bayonet constitution” and disenfranchised native Hawaiians. A Judge Sanford Dole was the American emissary sent to commit this scandalous act, after which his family founded the Dole Fruit Company.
After the Filipinos finally got rid of the Spanish empire McKinley sent troops to the Philippines to quell the Philippine Insurrection, which was fought in opposition to the replacement of the Spanish empire with the American empire. Historians say as many as a million Filipino civilians were killed along with 200,000 “insurrectionists.”
Then there was the Spanish-American war which was described by the great late nineteenth century Yale University libertarian scholar William Graham Sumner as “the conquest of the United States by Spain,” meaning that the U.S. government had finally abandoned once and for all the notion of being a mere union of states and had become an empire, the objective of all American imperialists beginning with Lincoln.
President Trump’s talk of annexing Canada, Greenland, and part of Panama is disturbing to say the least, and politically stupid in light of the fact that more than 40 percent of Canadians identify as socialists. It is totally in keeping, however, of the traditions of the Republican party, which describes itself as “the party of great moral ideas.”
