In terms of personality, McKinley and Roosevelt, I think, could not have been
more different. McKinley was quiet. He was unfailingly sensitive to other
people and to other races, I might say, when he was dealing with them. He was
a person who was known for understatement. Roosevelt, on the other hand, was a
person who believed that the White House should be used as a bully pulpit and
that he, obviously, should be the preacher. Roosevelt was willing to be out
front on these policies in a way that McKinley would prefer to have been behind
the scenes, to conduct what's later called a "hidden hand Presidency". With
Theodore Roosevelt there's very seldom anything that's hidden. Roosevelt is
our front. He exaggerates, where McKinley is much more restrained. He is a
person who is extremely active physically. McKinley is a person who usually
stays at home and reads or talks with people. He doesn't do anything more in
terms of the strenuous life than take carriage rides around Washington.
McKinley and Roosevelt are very different people and I think one of the ways of
understanding that difference occurred in a rather tragic way after McKinley's
assassination in September of 1901 and the Roosevelt Family moved into the
White House. And as they moved into the White House, they suddenly discovered
that McKinley and his wife had used very few rooms in the White House. The
White House had not been used by McKinley really.
McKinley and Roosevelt saw eye to eye on foreign policy. They both wanted the
United States to be a major Pacific power. They both wanted the United States
to be a major imperialist player. They both wanted to build up the American
military, especially the US Navy, very, very rapidly. And they did so. The
United States had no battleships in the late 1880s. Within a dozen years we'd
be one of the four or five greatest navies in the world with this battleship
fleet. The difference, I think, between the two is that while Roosevelt and
McKinley both wanted to use Presidential powers to the utmost, McKinley wanted
to do it quietly and behind the scenes while Roosevelt wanted to do it publicly
and with great excitement and to make sure that the American people understood
what he was doing and were coming along with him. McKinley preferred to get it
done rather than to in any way, shape, or form to excite anyone by what he was
doing. The quieter things were, the better McKinley liked them. Roosevelt and
McKinley had very different temperaments in this sense. There is another
difference, and that is that although both of them used Presidential powers in
new ways and in a sense McKinley was really a pioneer for the Presidential
powers that Theodore Roosevelt would later use as President. Again, McKinley
wanted to do these quietly. He did not use the White House as a bully pulpit
to tell the American people what he was doing. Roosevelt, on the other hand,
would use Presidential powers and then would go to a joint session of Congress
and send a paper telling them exactly what he was doing and telling them, as he
did, that in 1904 that if they didn't want to go along, that was too bad
because he was going to do it anyway. McKinley would have never done things
that way. And in that sense the temperament of the two people, I think, is an
interesting contrast even while their foreign policy objectives are very
close.
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