ABSTRACT

Many accounts of the 1896 election tell of a transcendent struggle, of "big business" versus "the people", a struggle in which Mark Hanna, fronting for "Wall Street", took control of "the government". The review of McKinley's staffing decisions, his choice of cabinet members and ambassadors, also attested to his independence, his distance from those "big business" sponsors. Two persistent methodological problems appear in those discussions of the presumed causal linkages. The first is the problem of categorical usage. The categorical reading–that "the masses", some ninety-plus percent of them, were "for war"–would be a very unlikely hypothesis. The second problem is to estimate, or better, to research and determine the percent of the citizens were for, against, indifferent. Hanna's machinations brought victory for "the interests" and defeat for the "the people". It is a theory of class dominance, one that "works" equally well in both the progressive and the Marxist readings.