to less than a dozen. chief of staff karl rove discusses his book the triumph of william mckinley and looks at the 1896 presidential campaign interviewed by the senior editor for the national review magazine >> host: we are here with karl rove the author of the triumph of william mckinley wife the election of 1896 still matters. he was a senior advisor for president george w. bush and the architect of the reelection in 2000 at 2004. karl rove shows how william mckinley used his watershed election to change his party, the political process and the nation. it's all here. the big things, the maneuvers, the personality. a great read for historians, political junkies and in our own while the cycle americans. who is william mckinley and what does he want? esko he's the governor in the state of ohio and throughout his career in congress from 1876 through 1890 he is become the lead voice in the republican party for the policy of protective tariffs. and that is at the surface. it's between the civil war in 1904 has not been born in the state of ohio so as the governor of ohio he's an immediate prospect for the presidential nomination. >> host: how big is ohio relative to other states? >> guest: with the fourth-largest in the union. about pennsylvania, illinois and ohio and interestingly enough, they've been consistent battleground states in the gilded age politics. pennsylvania and illinois reliably are republican and cleveland. the state of illinois by three percentage points defeating the incumbent of benjamin harris of indiana. >> host: what are his ambitions as 1896 began? >> guest: he wants to become president. the ambition was his entire adult life and his bride of canton ohio from one of the founding fathers.com guides and friends upon the return from their honeymoon in new york to washington and the husband has been defeated for the county attorney's job wants to be president of the united states. and she is thrilled about the prospect that the object is the republican party has been beaten in election and grover cleveland has come into office and has been the governor of ohio and has seen the country descended to the great depression and great republicans think that the election of 1896 is going to be there and he wants to be the nominee. he began to be seen the previous fall but if he gets elected in november. it is long-lasting and a deep depression. 15% of american workers lost their jobs in all likelihood. in fact in one day alone in one county in upstate new york about 10,000 were left go. >> as bad as 2008 or worse? in the economic system in the fall of 2008 and fannie and freddie were dragging down the financial institutions some of these were large forces that we suffered through because we were developing and we forget the american economy in the 1870s and '90s we were terribly dependent upon the other sources and the investment. the international events these kind of things that cost more investors to pull back and that accelerated with what many blame as the cause of the recession and the ultimate depression which was the decline in america's gold reserves and the government was getting to the point of a hundred million dollars which was thought to be the minimum amount necessary to sustain the value of the american currency. if you blow the $100 million level they took their investments, cash to their investment and there is a concern that the american dollar would become basically worthless >> host: because it is then backed by gold. >> guest: it was a matter of convenience. or you could conduct your business and paper money but you could take it to a treasury office. who are the front-runners? >> guest: they are the speaker of the house as an intellectual he had one of the largest private libraries, 5,000 volumes many of which he had a french tutor and a classic weight. he talked about the coming elections in the midterm and a set of the losses would be so plentiful that they would be buried in the unmarked graves and he was renowned and said the party could do worse than someone else running for president and they probably will. so he was the candidate backed by the leading figures of the republican party. so they were the party bosses led by the easy office of new york and matthew of pennsylvania they had allies and an odd collection of characters including one of the principal agents was james clarkson. she had a atrocious handwriting and he would always send it to the copy writers and articles call him that he'd written a. but they move around the country the most important of which is clarkson. james, the magnetic fan who was the secretary of state senator and we also have the two men from maine who can lifelong rivals and one of them is out of politics and they've taken to the state politics. their vision is first and foremost oriented to what is in it for me. they are very pragmatic people. they nominally pledged the support to read as their support to read is the front runner and a leading republican in the country. benjamin harris had discredited and has become a man and a dominant big figure but the other part of the strategy is let's get lots of favorite subs around the country that unites the state delegation and when we get to the convention nobody will have a majority of the delegates we can get in the back room and carve up the patronage to the advantage. some of them thought that they could be candidates. so governor bradley of kentucky who is a border state republican who is not frequently seen during this era he thinks of himself as one and senator davis of minnesota who's an expert is flattered enough. the governor and the of the state of new york the former vice president is put forward as a favorite and is a potentially plausible candidate but his principal purpose is to keep every new york republican in the pocket of the practice even if you didn't like the easy path as he was called up and they are potentially real candidates. the most prominent of which is william allison of iowa who is a solid legislature to create the interstate commerce commission and as a legislator who actually gets things done. the senior senator from the state of illinois who sought the presidency twice before. the chairman and seasoned salt and thus become governor. >> host: so all of these players are essentially out for themselves to read what is william mckinley out for? >> guest: he is out to restore prosperity. his belief is that the policy into protective care reps that he advocated in the congress for a great many years is the path to return to prosperity. >> host: so he isn't a free trader. >> guest: he's an interesting protectionist. his focus is the american working man. hi wages for american labor and protection from the chief labor inputs and he believes he is not a defender of the high parents for the purpose of making rich people rich in fact when he passes the target of 1890, which hopes contributes to the republican defeat in the house that year and is remembered by many as the thing that brought them to feed in the passage of that he was constantly asking people not how much do you need to get rich but how much does your industry need to be properly protected from unfair competition. the policies that he advocated it not advance america's economic growth that it's harder for us to understand why people felt so strongly about it and his whole vision was a nationalist product of economic progress that benefited the american working family. >> what is the path cannot nomination, what hurdles do you have to adjust to get their? >> guest: this becomes the nomination battle. before 1896, what you did if you put your faith in the hands of your friends. so you had somebody move her out of the country while you stay as far away from it as possible. you got your state and others in the country to sort of rally around a cause but you expected to go to the convention with some generalized since there was a front runner and that there were other candidates in the multi-balance at the convention generally the second choice. rarely did it become the nominee in 1888 benjamin harris received a nomination after james g. blaine who is the front-runner that is literally at andrew carnegie's castle and refuses to be a candidate and a saturday and on a sunday morning at his reader and is re- iterated is not the candidate and engine and harrison becomes the frontrunner because he was born in ohio. as they make the deal in west virginia they make a deal and return for the combined support as the secretary secretary treasury to become all of the patronage and it was the head of the customs house of new york city and this was ostensibly be the choice. >> said begins in iowa in january, new hampshire, february and goes on until the summer and it even starts before that. you're saying that before 1896. >> guest: if you have a favorite of the with a gathered together and unite behind them and a quotidian strikes for their favorite. how does mckinley confront the system. >> guest: he goes about it it in a methodical fashion to organize for the primaries. we organize for the primaries today and i'm going to identify from the long side of the points developed in my years in congress. friends inside the states who are going to become my agents and their object will be to systematically organize the local county conventions in order to influence the congressional district in order to generate the conventions at the state level that are dominated. all he wants is for that -- and be instructed to vote for him so he doesn't try to pick and choose who is going to be on the delegation but he does pick people to embolden them and authorize them to organize this effort that culminates in hopefully a victory at the state convention that strikes for him and he begins this process early. most of the time that maneuvering begins late in the year before that election. but immediately after the 1894 election he could make the argument he travels some 12,000 miles i believe it is airing ring the campaign in the midterm election to spread the message of the protectionism and the prosperity. and that the allies that want to show up if he immediately begins in early 1895 to systematically organize the states and he does so by going on vacation. >> host: mark hanna has a place. now who is this? >> guest: first of all he is a misunderstood. he's not the mastermind. he undermines the primary campaign and is a successful iron monger and call magnet from cleveland ohio. he comes from allegedly modest roots and they had a good distribution company in the southeastern ohio and moved to cleveland when they began to take off and he has a mind for business. they are selling tickets and collecting fares on one of their steamships and he is working as a clerk and working as a delivery man but he ultimately rises to the management of the families for me than when he marries into an even wealthier family in cleveland. he tries to build a refinery and loses everything to sell the refinery at a high school classmate named john b. rob fowler. neither one of them remembered, or mckinley remembers the he has no memory of making mckinley and is involved in a very weird thing. they beat the superintendent of one of the minds come the minds come and they were owned by the company that mark hanna has said so there's 20 son out of them and they tried that and nobody can be found to be fed them until sunday pressure is william mckinley into stepping forward and defending them and he gets all of them off and then when they give them a $120 fee that they collected. if instead contributed to the relief for the families for the lifelong reputation of the working man. they are owned by anna and he is sitting in the courtroom as the case goes on he's hired the best law firm in canton ohio and we have a young lawyer who's been practicing who has been practicing law for basically ten or 11 years here yet he's in his early 30s and he takes on the biggest law firm and beats them that he has no recollection because he's suffering from an attack of the highs and he's bothered up with sulfur ointment the ohio state convention over the conventions is elected as a delegate to the republican national convention. he doesn't want to go to the convention because he's for senator sherman of ohio and mckinley doesn't want to oppose his chief over the objection gets sent to the convention where he supports the ultimate winner of the nomination. >> host: so they are on opposite sides. they go back to the convention and by this time they've got a little bit of a semi-rivalry going. the ohio character entered the scene and joseph who runs for the governor in the et navy five and is again defeated and get elected in 1887 or runs in 1883 and is governor of the state in 1888 and they go to the national convention and hanna and mckinley are in support of senator sherman. they are desperately trying to make is either the presidential nominee or the vice presidential nominee at the convention. at this convention the convention sale made. they've been the leader in the protection that played a role. he is committed on sherman. he grabs an unused telegrams look at -right-brace comment and shares it with hanna if this is what i'm going to say. there is talk all across the floor. when they stand up and vote for them, mckinley rises on the floor in for the chairman of the convention and he recites what he's working on the telegram which is that he doesn't want anyone to consider the presidency because he is committed by the convention of the republicans in ohio and by his heart the support of john sherman for president into this would be a blight on his personal character if anyone were to vote for him and this is astonishing. here is a man who could have potentially swept the convention by stating the strive and letting these sort of things go his way because clearly a lot of people are second choice for president what makes him a potential nominee and then he says no and spends the next two days when the convention is in recess pushing his fellow delegates wherever here is that something is going to happen that somebody wants to be for him he shows up ... don't do this. i would rather cut off my right arm than to be the nominee of the party i would deserve to lose if i would allow my personal character. she hears in the next room some delegates talking about how they are going to go about getting them nominated and he throws open the door and says to stop it, don't do this anymore. and he is blown away by the willingness to step away from power. >> host: so he keeps the deal -- >> host: and he's passionate about it. he had committed to sherman and nothing was going to stay in the way. >> guest: so he takes note of them. >> host: mckinley has another very important system ally from chicago. >> host: he's actually born in the eye of the graduates from law school in cincinnati and heads west to make his living and mckinley meets him something early in 94 when they come to visit him in columbus ohio. they say if you want to run for president i will help you and they meet again in october of 1994 when mckinley stops in lincoln nebraska. he sees and mckinley the man who was separate and apart from the gilded age politics. he's a man of enormous integrity. and he's a man that is looking to the future. they think that they are charging farmers too high a price to get the goods to the market said he's a reformed republican and sees mckinley. his hair is red and he parted in the middle. they are in the same office building as another lawyer five years older than him. they often have lunch with the third. he decides he's going to become an entrepreneur and moved to chicago in january of 1895. >> host: they have these loyal capable supporters. where does he want to take the party lacks >> guest: mckinley has already begun to demonstrate he's a different kind of republican. it's the party of the white anglo-saxon, so he realizes that country is changing. our demography is becoming vastly different because of the relatively fewer immigrants from scotland, wales, ireland and germany. we've got got these portuguese, fishermen, spanish tenors, italian. they are becoming very diverse demographically and mckinley recognizes it. many people are catholic and the republican party they have incited a bias against catholics it is an anti-catholic and anti-immigrant group founded in iowa. are they under the control of the power. there were some german catholics and some polish catholics but they hated the catholics. in 1891 he is getting ready to run for actually 1893 he is getting ready to run as governor of ohio and he's won by 20 some odd thousand votes in ohio. they sent and called them up literally on a friday. they are working for the state and we found out you need to fire them and replace them with protestants. they leave the governor's race blank and click he won by the big majority. they take notice of it into the two members of the catholic hierarchy in ohio travels the state to perish and say governor mckinley defended the jobs of those that work for the state. >> host: the republican party needs catholics and immigrants partly because they've lost a big chunk of their traditional things. >> guest: they are being stolen by fraud or violence. think about it in 1896 we have the four states of the union that have a black majority at old male population and that means they are voting in the south 95-5 and give mckinley does dismally in every one of the stated it's because you take a look at it and turnout in the north is 88% from 75 to 78, 88%. essentially from the period of 1873 or four and on and there's a systematic effort to basically wipe out the black vote in the south. >> guest: there were localized groups in south carolina before red shirts and there is no election that goes by without violence being perpetrated on a large scale hard for us to understand today on the voters in the south people being routinely murdered for the simple exercise. >> host: was there any push back against this? >> guest: there was an effort of the champions and efforts to take away the federal protections for the southern elections and mckinley is one of the strongest opponents of it and then after the republicans were in the white house in 1988, they had had the launch to pass the bill to provide protections in federal elections and its defeated in the senate by a combination of silver republicans from the west who favored the bill that wanted to hold it hostage for the legislation to create the climate of silver and the southerners southerners, southern democrats who obviously would oppose any federal interference in what they were doing in the south. >> host: let's turn to the democratic party. who is contending for that nomination? >> guest: in et 96 it starts in 1893 because as the economy deepens, grover cleveland stands forward for maintaining the gold standard and does so by cutting deals with wall street and financiers who basically they allowed the united bailouts the united states via the bonds and transferring gold to the united states treasury. this makes them an enormously unpopular in the party. angry at the concentration of wealth and wall street in the east end fueled by the demand for the unlimited coinage. >> host: even though he's in the second term he can run against. >> guest: there is the thought that the cleveland democrats that cleveland will run again. no later than 1895 he doesn't make that clear so so there is nobody there's nobody that is allowed to merge on that side. if i'm in honest democrat and believe that grover cleveland is going to run. at the the front runner but he emerges as richard park rangers in the early 70s and becomes the leading proponent. >> host: why is that inflationary? >> guest: the idea would be the president setting as we do now the target for expanding the money supply by this%. you will be paid 1 dollar gold for in gold for every 16 units of 1 dollar of silver 16-1 and a dot will then be made into money and circulated. the problem was the value of gold and silver fluctuated at the time that we were talking in the run-up to the election, a dollars worth of gold by $2 worth of silver in other words each dollar of silver was worth about 62 cents of gold so if you created a silver dollar they would have to have the value of the gold dollar and obviously bad money chases out to go to hold onto that gold. they are the plantation owners or sharecroppers, so what they do is they told their land but they don't have any money. you bring up the crops in the fall and surprise, surprise the value is less than the money they lend you so in other words, each year you were getting a dollar deeper in debt. it's paid a special private banks, insurance companies or mortgage companies and in the deflationary period they are charged by the mortgage companies and insurance companies between eight to 14%. when you talk about people that are hard pressed particularly in hard-pressed particularly in the south around the midwest. you have the champion of the silver of course. in the run-up you have the state conventions and the sober democrats decide we are not going to settle on the candidate a candidate we will discourage anybody from offering a. they are repudiated the economic policies and set the total delegate. it takes the majority to write the platform by two thirds to dominate the candidate. we will never get to two thirds of the convention. we are nothing to do but to nominate a true silver man but by god we want to combine them to a silver platform but they succeed beyond their expectation and they are within by the time the convention opens up in the whisper of getting two thirds. what stands in the way is an extraordinary pair of victories in michigan and minnesota. at the last minute they prevail among the political friends in both before postmaster and democratic national committee man in minnesota to make the efforts to keep them from falling to both of those states are expected to go so for both of them end up going gold. they say we've got more than one third of the delegates so that we are going to do is hold onto that one third and use it for power and influence to pick between the silver man this is all pretty conventional for the times to make the deal and end up on the multiple ballots and so the issue. he sees himself as a presidential candidate. he's at time of the convention 36-years-old, the youngest man ever nominated for either major political party for president this day and he is also the only candidate i can find who is who thinks of himself as a candidate but nobody else does. on the democrat excited they are dick for from missouri and the uncle from iowa who was a distant second. there's a battle over the platform and its settled. so how does the argument play out as the last stand of the convention. brian has chosen. they are closed and will fight over. there were the other principal speakers who were going to talk on this. the leader of the gold forces objects. and if they spend the entire time kicking him around job jackets. so he fights over the issue how much time each side will have to close to make their final argument and they want a longer time to speak and he takes the opening argument and gives the closing 20 minutes over two what's supposed to be 30 minutes becomes 20 minutes over to william jennings bryan. the final accident occurs just before he is ready to speak and that is why they are closing and he speaks and they close. that happens is they stand up and the speech is so disgraceful he brings up the civil war again and insults every northern democrat and its just he calls it a fictional argument and senator jones of arkansas stands up and says i were the color of the south and the civil war civil war into this isn't a sexual argument, this is of mankind. this is an argument that is national in nature and for one brief moment if they stand together and basically cheering him on in a national monument because they hate ben tillman so much but finally what happens. over here the leader of the gold forces said we don't we give each side of ten minutes and what happens is that gives him a chance to give not a 20 minute speech with a 30 minute speech and of a 30 minute speech is a brilliant piece of work that he delivers without a single node having outlined in his mind and having played out the final moments several days before at the debate in nebraska that he literally looked chicago where the convention was to pick up to speak in nebraska and he gives across the gold speech and literally. overnight it was a crown of thorns he dabbles his hands on the side of his head and holds out his arms, his head is up to his chest is out and he finishes it is complete silence. he drops his hands and steps back. and the atlanta constitution says that it was silent for a few moments more. it was held in fearful silence for a few moments more and then the place explodes. it's got to be one of the great marvels of political convention and moves nebraska. they make became the nominee the next day. >> host: so this sounds like it is coming out of the democratic convention with the powerful force. how does mckinley counter this? >> guest: they appear self-satisfied and say basically the democrats have really screwed this up. we are going to win this easily. and he is talking about how he is going to take a vacation sailing up the coast if they do not expect he will return for the first of august if no activity needs to begin until the first of september. this is now early july. they put in charge of the campaign headquarters in chicago and he travels to the east to try to consolidate the machine republicans and they begin trying to organize and run a campaign in the state parties they begin to do these campuses that he undertook in those and begin to look at the bad news that they are way behind. >> host: the campus is likewise? an informal poll tax >> guest: it's even more than that. if you conducted a campus, let's say i a lot. if he conducted a campus in july and august which meant that every received in iowa had a chair and ascertained the attitude of every single voter in the precinct and reported it to the county that reported it to the state so you have not just simply the poll of 800 or 1300 islands chosen by random, you have the pull of every single island in the precinct chairman was responsible for figuring out where were they and suddenly they discovered the 25 or 30% have left them in the camp which would have meant huge losses for both the industrial midwest. and this weekend's mckinley along with keen advice from a man who doesn't like him much. benjamin harrison. but he has a problem and by mid-august in preparing the speech for the acceptance of the nomination in late august he's made the decision. the issue of the protection of its going to dissipate in a few weeks. he tells one of his friends you know in a month it won't be talked about this. he figures it out and starts to find a way and spends two thirds of his acceptance speech talking about a third of it. but he is for gold. >> guest: but he's been on the issue in congress in fact one of the first big boats that he had in 1870 and 18781 of the first major votes he makes for the passage poetry institutes the currency with the silver coinage and insufficient for the free silver men that anathema and he has a lot of people that viewed the merchants who think that there's too little money. it is a necessity. but they like to emphasize things that unify people and unified labors in the minds. whereas the pre- silvers puts the republican campaign. one of the strongest southern supporters supporters, the only republican senator from the south of north carolina almost walks out of them because of the free silver issues of this issue split the republican party and as a result he wants to stay away from it and is afraid that he needs the vote of the republicans in order to win that finally realizes i can't avoid this issue and then in late august he begins to tackle the issue still takes him two or three weeks to finally settle on the right kind of language and he does so with the help i believe that the former head of the largest labor union in america and he gives the speech sponsored by the mckinley weekend begins to describe the cooper's union why it's important to the working man to have a currency backed by gold rather than the currency backed by silver. >> host: so we have the two nominees. in the two positions they held as each three and how does each man campaign and how does mckinley campaign. >> guest: he's got the support of the populist party but their price when they nominated their own presidential running. you put them with the populace who voted for the general in 1892 and thereby think that a public. but he's got a democratic running mate and a populist running mate and he has to finesse the issue of how do i get that off the ticket in the battleground states where i can't afford to devote to be split. they have to storm the country in a fashion that can't be done before. he's going to campaign the country into the presidential candidates -- guest co. there've been occasions in which the candidate might get on the road and go to a major camp to number the kind of times they spoke on the road to less than a dozen. there've been sort of a front porch campaign. he had 80 speeches he gave to the delegations to hit and that was over the course of the four-month period. he is making his own train reservations riding in the common car and at the depot someplace and hoping that when they got to the end of the line somebody would pick them up and have a hotel reservation. he has a car provided him but sometimes he's just riding in the head of the populist campaign. you have to give them a private car. we took a late trade to baltimore because they wanted them to be at this little junction in delaware but we waited until 2 a.m. to switch trains. the other private car he could fall asleep in the car. psp impressed to go on the road because once the panic sets in, it is unstoppable. he's panicked. he is now by late july and early august beginning to believe that we have a race on our hands and he keeps pressuring him you have to go on the road. he says to him look i can't do that. if i go on the road he's going to get on the trapeze and i'm going to have to mimic him if i go on the road i've been on the road before and i know what it's like. he says i have to think before i speak so what happens is people are already showing up at the groups to see the major somebody and i think that somebody is when mckinley says let's make that. only let's get it organized. we are here to see you let's set it up so we know who's coming and let's invite the people we want to have come so it's not just the people who want to volunteer to come that let's have them come if it is a critical voter group from a critical state let's know that they are coming and have them send us what they want to say in advance so we can edit it and find out i'm going to say to say so i have remarked each time i show up and we will have been at the station, take them under the arch to the courthouse square and have a form and all kinds of entertainment to keep them occupied and when the moment comes when i finish knitting the last delegation we know how long it takes to march up market street market street and they can come on and have an organized program and they can say what they want to say. it is because the campaign on an industrial scale. 750,000 people come to the canton ohio. they show up at the station committee go to the town square. sometimes they feed, sometimes they take special groups defeated the tabernacle and they have appropriate drinks for the man. if you get a cup of coffee and a sandwich into the come through the nature and its industrial in scale but it's unified, organized and deliberate. the message is tailored to the individual audience and repeated back in their hotel papers and repeated to them when they go home. >> guest: she would go everywhere and there were people. he attracted spectators and mckinley attracted supporters. people went to see -- it was targeted and what he did is in essence he created an army. the campaign was based around the principle. we want to create people that will serve as the surrogates and advocates. they organized everybody. they have groups for blacks and germans and women because some could vote in the western states. western states. the organized traveling salesman because they traveled widely, spoke while you do lots of people but they were sweeping the country and lots of men were falling into it so they decided to tap it in. they then with not a single county in the northeast that goes. mckinley went 75% of the vote and he takes all that critical battleground states, traditional battleground follows, new york and new, new jersey, connecticut, ohio and indiana. he loses the rocky mountain state and all the seats of the old confederacy fall to the democrats had several of them are close at a critical breakthrough is in the border states from the blair commended blair to maryland, west virginia and kentucky where mckinley wins and the republicans haven't won in decades and he narrowly loses missouri where the chances are hurt by the division between republicans and then he sleeps or he takes oregon and california on the west coast with 51% of the vote which nobody had done since the reelection of grant in 1872. and when the dominant majority in the electoral. >> host: what are the consequences of that for the two-party system? >> guest: it brings to the party the faulty labors which gives the republicans on into the next 36 years up to the depression. republicans hold the house for 26 out of 36 years. the white house for 28 and the senate for 30 and the only time they lose power is that when they do in 1912 and hold more governors and legislators until today. and in most cities in this type are routinely republican, boston, new york, philadelphia. they are left and right. the smalltime farmers who have their own farms and the traditional small-business allies of the republican party. >> host: so the real creativity and foresight. who since his time has been the lichen, has there been anybody but confidential tax >> guest: . they had become an element in the republican party in the campaign. they had bribed and as a result a lot of the jewish voters begin a public and. ronald reagan and his own way. politics began but if you are looking at it who is a strong principled leader and was able to change. >> host: this is an entertaining book and it is packed with information. it has the big themes and it has wonderful little details, with my favorite detail which was the question of who is going to give the opening invocation of the republican convention. you mentioned the american protective association of the protestant group. so is it going to be a protestant minister or catholic priest and how do they finesse at this point. >> guest: it's more than anything else i would expect of the that the catholics but also anti-jew. so it's an enormous signal on the charge, you are no longer in charge and charge and you have ministers thereafter but mckinley as a result of this. >> host: great detail. thanks very much. >> that was "after words," booktv signature program which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed. watch past afterwards programs online on booktv.org. ..