The 25th president is having a moment in the spotlight.

William McKinley, twice elected to the presidency before being felled by an assassin's bullet in 1901, won praise from President Donald Trump during the latter's inaugural address last month. Trump praised McKinley for making "our country very rich through tariffs and through talent." Trump also pledged to restore McKinley's name to North America's highest peak, "where it belongs." As the esteemed editor and McKinley biographer Robert Merry recently observed, "It isn't difficult to see how Trump, once he became familiar with the McKinley story, would embrace it as a model for his own White House leadership."

While it makes sense that Trump would see much to emulate in McKinley's record on tariffs and trade, McKinley seems a less sure guide on matters of war and peace. On that front, there are better models than McKinley, on whose watch the US engaged in an unnecessary and unjust war against Spain which resulted in the subsequent occupation of the Philippines (McKinley should also earn demerits for inflicting Teddy Roosevelt on the nation).

Unlike today, at the fin de siècle America's role as a global power was subject to debate. Mark Twain, then among the country's most renowned literary voices, was a founding member of the Anti-Imperialist League. Twain remarked at the time, "I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land." Henry Adams, author, professor and scion of America's first and finest political dynasty, wrote to his brother Brooks (who unlike Henry was an ardent proponent of empire) that he thought "our Philippine excursion" was "a false start in the wrong direction and one that is more likely to blunt our energies than to guide them." He continued: "It is a mere repetition of the errors of Spain and England." 

Despite these objections, the Washington establishment set off in search of monsters to destroy. Adams' confidante John Hay, who served as McKinley's ambassador to the Court of St. James and then, later, as Roosevelt's secretary of state, enthused about McKinley's "splendid little war; begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that fortune which loves the brave." The imperial fever of that time was a byproduct of new theories of naval superiority promoted by Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan as well as Darwinian notions of racial superiority such as those infamously expressed in Rudyard Kipling's White Man's Burden (1899) which described native Filipinos as "new-caught, sullen peoples, half devil and half child." Such was the distance we traveled from the days of Jefferson who, in 1791 wrote, "if there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest."