How the McKinley Tariff Almost Destroyed the Republican Party

01/01/2025•Mises Wire•Thomas J. DiLorenzo

https://mises.org/mises-wire/how-mckinley-tariff-almost-destroyed-republican-party

President Trump’s first major speech on economic policy in 2017 was delivered in Lexington, Kentucky near the home of Henry Clay, the early nineteenth century leader of the Whig party and the epitome of a political tool of the moneyed plutocracy of the day. Clay championed Alexander Hamilton’s “American System” of high protectionist tariff taxes that would plunder American consumers for the benefit of politically-connected businesses; corporate welfare for road- and canal-building and railroad corporations; and a national bank controlled by politicians who would use the bank to corrupt politics and solidify its supporters’ political power. It was really the rotten, corrupt, British mercantilist system of the eighteenth century against which the American Revolution was fought to secede from. As Edgar Lee Masters once wrote, Clay’s Whig party had no platform for its platform was “political plunder and nothing else.” If your platform is indeed political plunder it is a good idea to keep quiet about it and don’t broadcast it. Proclaim to be selflessly serving all of humanity instead. To Hamilton and Clay such a system is not so bad if one is on the money-collecting end of the plunderers rather than the plundered, as the American colonists were.

Lo and behold, President Trump has discovered a new political hero to idolize: President (1897-1901) William McKinley of Ohio whose election was orchestrated by the wealthiest man in Ohio (and the U.S.), John D. Rockefeller, who ran the Standard Oil Company out of his Cleveland home. President Trump’s new hero is his new hero because he was known in the U.S. Congress before being elected president as the most rabid Republican party protectionist in a party that was founded on the principle of protectionism (and of corporate welfare and a national bank) in the mid 1850s. The 1890 McKinley tariff was named after Representative William McKinley because of his notoriety as a tool of the Northern manufacturing plutocracy. It created the highest average tariff rate in U.S. history up to that point and targeted such items as wool and tin with especially high tariff taxes, some exceeding 100 percent. It caused such a spike in the prices of such items that in the next election the Republican party was wiped out, losing both houses of Congress and the White House, with the Democrat party having a 2-1 advantage in the House. McKinley himself was defeated and was installed by his Rockefeller handlers as the governor of Ohio.

The Rockefeller cabal got McKinley elected president in 1896. One of his first “accomplishments” in 1897 was to the political disaster of the McKinley Tariff Tax by signing the Dingley Tariff Tax which created another highest average tariff rate in history. 

McKinley was also a notorious imperialist, waging an imperialistic war against Spain (the Spanish-American War) during which the U.S. government conquered Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, leading the great William Graham Sumner to author his famous article, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.” The Spanish-American War, Sumner wrote, turned the U.S. into an imperialist power, just like the thoroughly corrupt and bankrupted Spanish empire. (All empires, by the way, view their populations as good for two things: as taxpayers and cannon fodder in the empire’s wars). As General Smedley Butler wrote, “war is a racket,” and this war was fought for the benefit of various American politically-connected corporate racketeers. 

This was all achieved under the stewardship of President-elect Trump’s new heartthrob, William McKinley. Just recently the president-elect pledged to change the name of Mount Denali in Alaska back to Mount McKinley in honor of the hyper protectionist and imperialist who is his role model of the day. The majority of Alaskans are reportedly against this, preferring a native American Indian name for the tallest mountain in America to a crooked Rockefeller-connected Ohio political hack. McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and was succeeded by his mentally disturbed vice president, Theodore Roosevelt. 

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