Why the McKinley Monument
Until Donald Trump began talking up William McKinley, I hadn’t given the McKinley monument in the Panhandle much thought. (That’s a phrase I should put on speed dial or whatever the computer keyboard equivalent is. There’s so much in the park I didn’t consider until I started this newsletter.)
Before his recent resurrection by Trump, McKinley was perhaps best known for being assassinated. Many observers have dissected Trump’s hard-on for the 25th president. As a New York Times headline put it, McKinley “loved tariffs and expanded American territory. What more do you need to know?”
Small wonder Trump has ordered the renaming of North America’s highest peak from Denali to Mount McKinley.
McKinley led a three-month war with Spain over Cuba’s independence. Once Spain surrendered, Cuba became an American protectorate and the US gained control of Puerto Rico, Guam, and for $20 million, the Philippines. At the same time, McKinley pushed a joint resolution through Congress for the US to annex Hawaii. “Practically overnight, the United States became a colonial power,” notes historian Lewis L. Gold.
(There are other noteworthy parallels between the two presidents. Like Trump, McKinley helped consolidate Republican hold on power; cut back the civil service; and was a master at using the press, publicity and a then-new communications technology, the telephone, in his campaigns and presidency. And of course, both came to power in eras dominated by the super-rich— the industrial robber barons in McKinley’s time, the tech oligarchs of today.)
Thanks to McKinley, the US reach now extended beyond its western borders. In the view of the San Francisco Call, that shift “changed the front of this republic from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” What an exciting prospect for San Francisco, then west coast’s the largest west.
But the likeliest reason for the monument — just one of four McKinley memorials in the country — is a visit McKinley made here in May, 1901, his one and only time in the city. It occurred as part of “a six week victory lap around the country to inaugurate his second term” with San Francisco in the west and Buffalo in the east as the trip’s highlights. McKinley left DC on April 29, with 43 others in tow, including his wife, Ida, cabinet members, staff, reporters, and friends. Two weeks into the trip, Ida became gravely ill from dysentery and an infected cut on a finger. The entourage cut short their California itinerary and rushed to San Francisco, where the few days planned in the city stretched out for nearly two weeks.
A crowd of thousands greeted McKinley when his train pulled into the Ferry Building. Mayor James Phelan welcomed him with remarks that sound an almost poignant desire to impress on the president the city’s significance: “We feel that San Francisco is, indeed, one of the Nation’s capitals,” he declared. “Our city not only renders municipal service for its inhabitants and fulfills the purposes of a metropolis as the chief city of a great state, but its position is better defined as the principal port of the United States on the Pacific ocean. It is, therefore, Mr. President, in a peculiar sense your city as well as ours. It belongs to the country.”
The first couple settled into the mansion of Henry T. Scott, president of Pacific Telephone and Telegraph. Ida’s condition worsened and McKinley cut out most of his planned engagements to remain by her side. For days the whole city anxiously tracked her progress, the newspapers detailing her every up and down. “Mrs McKinley lay at death’s door all day yesterday, but made a slight rally last night,” The Chronicle reported on May 17 in a story headlined “Anxious Crowds About the House of Suffering.”
And indeed, throngs of people and reporters gathered across the street in Lafayette Park, hoping for a glimpse of the president or his wife. The Park Commissioners sent “an immense rhododendron in full bloom” from Golden Gate Park to adorn the front of the temporary White House, according to The Chronicle.
Once Ida’s health improved and she was on the mend, McKinley resumed his itinerary, a schedule packed with typical presidential duties. He went to Oakland to christen a new battleship, the Ohio, that had been built there. At the Presidio, he reviewed a parade of troops, including soldiers recently returned from the Spanish-American War and visited injured veterans of the war at Letterman Hospital. He hosted a reception for all the consul generals in the city, and met with various political and business leaders. He attended the ground-breaking ceremony for a statue in Union Square commemorating Admiral George Dewey’s victory in Manila Bay during the Spanish-American war. McKinley turned the dirt with a spade cast from the steam whistle of one of the Spanish warships sunk during the battle.
He led a group of cabinet members and city big wigs such as Phelan, Henry Spreckels and Henry J. Crocker on an impromptu excursion through the Presidio and Golden Gate Park. “After a drive through the Midwinter Fair grounds the coaches were driven to the summit of Strawberry Hill and then took a drive about Stow Lake. The coaches finally brought up at the old music stand, where the entire party was photographed,” The Chronicle reported.
By May 25, Ida had recovered and the first couple departed San Francisco to head back to Washington.
Four months later, on September 14, McKinley was killed while shaking hands with the public during a visit to the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo.
Within weeks of the assassination, Mayor Phelan launched a fund-raising drive to build a monument to McKinley. By year’s end, San Franciscans had contributed more than $30,000. (Which, incidentally, was more than donations to a fund for an Abraham Lincoln memorial. The Call sought to explain the difference by noting that the memory of Lincoln’s death had weakened over time, while McKinley’s death was “still acutely felt as the supreme tragedy of the year.”)
Phelan originally hoped to place the monument in Union Square, or at the western end of Golden Gate Park, “looking out upon our distant possessions, Hawaii and the Philippines.” The Park Commission persuaded the monument backers to instead place it at the eastern end where it could provide a grand entrance to the park.
On May 14, 1903, nearly two years to the day after the McKinley arrived in San Francisco, his successor, Teddy Roosevelt came to break ground for the monument. Five thousand people turned out for the event. Speaking to the crowd, Phelan eulogized McKinley as “obedient and affectionate as a son. patriotic and faithful as a soldier, honest and upright as a citizen, tender and devoted as a husband, moral and clean in every relation of life.”
The resulting monument, designed by sculptor Robert Ingersoll Aitken isn’t the typical “great man” tribute. The McKinley part of the sculpture consists only of a bas relief medallion set into a 15-foot granite pedestal.
The more imposing part of the monument is the 20-foot female figure representing The Republic, atop the pedestal. She holds a sword at rest in her left hand and palm leaf upright in her right hand that’s meant symbolize “strength after victory.”
Perhaps that idea gave comfort to the many displaced by the 1906 earthquake who set up tents around the memorial’s base.
The monument was built in the hope that it would keep McKinley’s memory and example alive.
Instead, the 25th president faded from memory and the monument became mainly known as a lure for taggers. The Arts Commission was spending so much money cleaning off the graffiti that in 2013 it floated the idea of surrounding the memorial with a fence. As far as I know the fence never happened. The monument still gets tagged and draws people to hang out on its base.
I biked by the other day and stopped to talk to a man sitting on the steps by the pedestal. “Do you know what this monument is,” I asked.
Looking up it up and down as if seeing it for the first time, he admitted he didn’t know what it was.
I explained it was for a former president, William McKinley. “Do you know who William McKinley was?”
“No, I don’t,” he said. I told him a bit about McKinley’s presidency and how Trump was now invoking his name.
“What’s his relation to the park?” the man asked. A reasonable question.
“He visited the city in 1901,” I said.
“Hmm,” he considered. “That’s pretty tenuous.”
Ol' Phelan really knew how to kiss some colonizer ass. It's a relief to know that the 47th may not be our worst president, and that we survived McKinley, and we will survive this as well.