It was particularly fortunate to Mr. McKinley and the country that upon entering Congress as a young man he was placed upon the Ways and Means Committee that proved congenial as well as specially adaptable to him. Here, under the tutelage of such chairmen as Kelley and Garfield, it was natural that with his bent he should reach the chairmanship of that great committee himself. It was thus that the opportunity came to him for the exercise of his special genius in tariff matters. His first speech in Congress was on the tariff and his last discussed the same theme.
From the beginning of his public career McKinley was the unfaltering, sturdy, consistent and intelligent advocate of the principle of protection to American industries by tariff duties imposed with the purpose of keeping the cheap labor products of European and Asiatic countries out of our vast and desirable American markets. He was not, as was Garfield, for such protection as would lead to ultimate free trade. He believed that free trade is a dream of theorists, which would bring industrial ruin and poverty to the United States if it were put into practice, benefiting no class but the importing merchants of the seaboard cities. He had no patience with tariffs formed to “afford incidental protection.”
Tariff bills, he thought, should aim primarily at protection, and tariff legislation should be scientific and permanent, with a view to the continuous prosperity of the industrial classes. This was the chief aim of the McKinley bill, passed when he was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. No doubt other minds in both House and Senate helped to frame that measure, but McKinley’s thought and work were on every page of it. When the Republican party was defeated in 1892, largely through public misapprehension of that measure and before it had received a fair trial, McKinley was one of the few Republican leaders who continued to breast the adverse current and who never faltered a moment in the faith that the tide would set back to protection.
Others wanted to change front and abandon the high protection principle. He refused, and proceeded to realign his party on the old line of battle. He set out to educate public sentiment anew, and during his memorable stumping tour of 1894 he made 367 speeches and spoke in the States of Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio. For eight weeks he averaged seven speeches a day, ranging in length from ten minutes to an hour.