“But why, why all this?” I asked.
“Oh,” said my hostess, “mining is unstable business. When there are long shutdowns we must help the miners out, see that they have food.”
The intimacy with Dot Walker gave me a home. Mrs. Walker treated me as a daughter, and as for Robert Walker, who still called me “Sis,” he liked to have me around and to give me a word of wise counsel now and then. It is because, in those months, I learned him to be as kindly, shrewd, honest, simple-minded a man as I have ever known that I must interrupt my narrative long enough to put in here the story of one of the cruelest episodes of which I personally have known in the fifty years that I have been a more or less understanding observer of our national political life. The story is of Robert Walker and his one-time friend William McKinley, the twenty-fifth President of the United States.
When I became an intimate of the Walker household a person I often heard mentioned by its head was “the Major”—Major McKinley. Now it was not in 1880 a name unfamiliar to me. I had met it already at Allegheny College, where McKinley had once been a student. When the Civil War broke out he had joined the exodus of students who volunteered at the first call. He had come out of the war a major, studied law, and settled in Canton, Ohio, only sixty or seventy miles from Poland and in the same Congressional District. Here in 1876—the Mahoning district as it was called—had sent him to Congress. It was a matter of interest in Allegheny in my time to have one of its former students turn out a Congressman, its usual crop being teachers, preachers, and missionaries.
When I came to Poland I learned quickly that McKinley had lived there as a boy, had attended the seminary, and was their proudest example of “the boy who had made good.” For four years he had been their Congressman. How they boasted of him! How solidly they voted for him!
I was not long in the Walker household before I sensed something more in Robert Walker than a citizen’s pride in McKinley. It was that species of adoration a modest, honest-minded man often has for his leader—his leader who can do no wrong. I realized this when I first saw them together. The Major had come to our seminary commencement in June of 1881. I remember nothing at all of the speech he made, but the scene on the wide green in front of the village church after the exercises were over remains vivid. Scattered about were scores upon scores of girls and women in the frilly white gowns, the long white feather boas, the flower-trimmed hats, the gay parasols of the period; and in and out wound the Major, shaking hands, smiling, exchanging friendly greetings—all together at home, no back slapping, no kissing of babies. It was all so gentle, so like a picture of an English garden party where the politics are hidden beneath the finest of social veneers. And there was Robert Walker almost effulgent.
“Well, Sis,” he asked me later, “what do you think of the Major?” A remark to which he expected no answer. What answer other than his could there be?
What I did not know then was that from the beginning of William McKinley’s political career Robert Walker had been his chief—and for a time, I think, his only—financial backer. Beginning with his first campaign for Congress in 1875 Mr. Walker had advanced the Major $2,000 for expenses. He continued equal advances before each successive campaign, the understanding being that $1,000 a year was to be paid on the debt.
Along with this financial support went a staunch support of all the Major’s political ideas. These ideas were those of the Republican party, and for men like Robert Walker the party was hallowed. It was “the party of Lincoln.” Loyalty to Lincoln required loyalty to all that was directly or indirectly connected with him.
“Is Robert Lincoln a dude?” one of my Mahoning County acquaintances asked me years later when I told him that I had been talking with Robert Lincoln about his father.
“Is he a dude?”—by which he meant, as I took it, a kind of Ward McAllister.
“No, no, not that,” I assured him.
“Well,” he said reflectively, “even if he was a dude I would vote for him for President because he is Abraham Lincoln’s son.”
The chief test of loyalty to the party of Lincoln in Ohio was the degree of support given to the high protective tariff. William McKinley’s support was devout and unqualified. He looked on a duty so low that it allowed importations as a species of treason. There was tin plate, for example.
The year that I went to Poland, 1880, McKinley first espoused a duty on tin plate. There was strong opposition among iron and steel manufacturers. They felt they already had all they could look after in Congress; but when they told this to McKinley his answer was that unless they supported tin plate he would not support their tariffs. Naturally they yielded, and tin plate was added to their list of protégés. McKinley felt so sure of ultimate victory for the duty that he evidently did not hesitate to advise his friends to get ready for its coming. At all events he encouraged Robert Walker, suggested to him in fact that he establish in Youngstown, Ohio, a stamping plant for the making of tinware, taking with him as partner his brother-in-law Andrew J. Duncan. As Andrew Duncan had no money to invest the Major gave to Mr. Walker a sheaf of signed notes to be used whenever he had need of money.
Now Robert Walker was not a manufacturer; he was a farmer and a good one—a coal operator—the banker of the Village of Poland and the surrounding country, but it was not in Robert Walker’s nature to refuse to help the Major or his relatives in their ambitions, as he had already frequently proved. Indeed, at that time he was backing McKinley’s brother Abner in a business venture which was soon to fail with loss of all he had put in. But Robert Walker’s faith in McKinley’s wisdom was such that he could not conceive of failure in anything he advised.
The plant was started in 1890. There could not have been a more unlucky moment to launch a new industry. The long depression of the nineties was beginning. Iron and steel were already seriously affected. Money was tight. Robert Walker found himself almost at once forced to use the Major’s notes. He found only too soon that he had embarked on a hopeless undertaking, and in February of 1893 the works were closed.
Now at that moment Mark Hanna and his colleagues on the National Republican Committee were counting on William McKinley to win the Presidential election for them in 1896. The announcement that he was involved in the Walker failure to the tune of some one hundred thousand dollars, more than the combined fortune of himself and wife, was a cruel blow to their plan. McKinley was straightforward with them. He had signed the notes; he must give up politics, go back to the law, and pay his honest debts. But that could not be permitted. He was too important—one hundred thousand dollars was a small sum compared to what the Republican Committee expected from his election. The money was raised—not so quietly. It became necessary to explain how McKinley had become involved to this amount, and the explanation which McKinley’s political friends put out was that he was a victim of “a man named Walker,” as Mark Hanna’s able biographer, Herbert Croly, calls him—a man whom he had trusted, and who had deceived him as to the amount of money he was raising on his notes. That is, the Republican committee deliberately put on Robert Walker the stigma of fraud, presented him to the public as a man who had betrayed confidence, and William McKinley never denied their presentation.
I have it from Robert Walker and from his daughter that no note of William McKinley was ever cashed without consulting him, and I believe them. Moreover, Andrew Duncan was in this enterprise and knew what was going on. It is an interesting fact that when my friend Clara Walker, who kept the accounts for the McKinleys and her father, went the morning after the announcement of the failure to her office in Youngstown, all her books had disappeared along with many papers which belonged to the firm.
I had been living abroad for two years when all this happened, but just before I had left America I had talked with Robert Walker about his venture—the money he was trying to raise on McKinley’s notes. His confidence was untarnished.
“The Major knows, Sis. He will see this thing through. I’d do anything to back him.”
And he did. When on my return I went to see my friends I found they had given up practically everything, and Robert Walker himself was utterly broken by the ignominy heaped on him.
I begged him to give me his side of the story, let me tell it, told him I would never rest until I had an opportunity to put down what I knew of his long support of the Major’s ambitions, what I believed of him as a man of unselfish integrity. He absolutely and finally refused. “Nobody would ever believe the Major could do anything wrong. I didn’t.”
But the Major had allowed the oldest and most loyal friend he had in his public life to be ruined not only in fortune but in reputation. Now that Robert Walker and Mrs. Walker are both gone and reviving the episode can no longer give them pain, it gives me a certain solace to put down the story as I believe it.