Trump’s McKinleyism is not deeply informed. On Fox Business, the President said that McKinley had been assassinated because “he was charging all these countries money, probably. Who the hell knows?” (His murderer, Leon Czolgosz, was an anarchist from Michigan, so not an agent of foreign commercial interests, probably. Who the hell knows?) The historian Eric Rauchway describes Trump as “historically oblivious” for “evincing no awareness of the depression of the 1890s, whose severity was owed, in part, to the protectionist tariffs he praises.”
Trump’s knowledge is thin, but his instincts are sharp, and if he picked the wrong individual he nevertheless picked the right era. McKinley sprang from an age when the United States’ relationship to the world was fundamentally different. It was a time of trade barriers and colonial wars, a time before what political scientists call the “liberal international order.” Trump grew up in the shadow of that order and came to resent it enormously. His attraction to the nineteenth century seems to derive from his desire to be free of liberal internationalism. But, in reaching back to that past, what sort of future is he steering toward?
“The world has grown smaller,” a London bank director announces in Jules Verne’s 1873 novel, “Around the World in Eighty Days.” The book’s hero, Phileas Fogg, wagers that he can use the new technology of steam-powered ships to circumnavigate the globe in under three months. The proposition wasn’t absurd. In 1890, someone completed the journey in seventy-two days; later that year, someone else did it in sixty-seven.
Verne was registering what historians sometimes refer to as the first globalization (the second being that of today). The late nineteenth century saw an accelerated movement across borders of people, goods, ideas, and money. The center of this pulsing network—in Verne’s novel as in real life—was Britain, which seemed to have the run of the planet. The United States, for its part, was awash in British investments. Touch an American railroad and you were touching British capital.
Manufacturers worldwide sought refuge from British competition, frequently resorting to tariffs. In the Gilded Age, U.S. politicians like Representative William (Pig Iron) Kelley helped erect high walls—about forty to forty-five per cent on dutiable goods, according to the economist Douglas Irwin’s monumental history of trade policy, “Clashing Over Commerce” (2017). Tariffs, which aimed to protect homegrown industries from what Kelley called “overwhelming foreign assaults,” were then essential to federal revenues, so it was hard to find a leader who opposed them outright. But for Republicans, whose electoral base was the Northern manufacturing core, they were an obsession. Pig Iron Kelley “thinks tariff, talks tariff, and writes tariff every hour of the day,” one of his fellow-congressmen said. “A roommate of his tells me that he mumbles it over in his dreams.” President Benjamin Harrison, another tariff man, owned two opossums named for his economic policies—Mr. Protection and Mr. Reciprocity.