Newt Gingrich
says that Donald Trump is “increasingly convinced of the McKinley Model: High tariffs lead to massive capital investments in the U.S., leading to high-paying jobs. . . . I assume this will be a two-three year transition where we’ll all have to adjust.”
If I were a Republican up for reelection to the House or Senate in 2026, I would not be very reassured by the promise of a “two-three year transition,” when even the usually blusteringly optimistic Trump told Congress that there may be “a little bit of an adjustment period.” This is less of a concern for the 81-year-old Gingrich, who hasn’t held office since the last century, but Trump should be more concerned with the fate of his congressional allies. Also, given how much scorn one hears from MAGA media voices for Bush-era Republicans and “Zombie Reaganism,” it’s ironic to hear Trumpworld embracing
Karl Rove’s hero, William McKinley, and engaging in their own form of Zombie McKinleyism.
The “McKinley Model” is not the most encouraging historical parallel. It’s also one that is much more perilous to apply today. We should not skip over McKinley’s record in Congress to go straight to his presidency. Republicans were, it is true, the party of higher tariffs from Abe Lincoln to Herbert Hoover; I advise fans of tariffs to not ask what happened under Hoover to begin changing that. The problem with applying Zombie McKinleyism today, however, also arises from the great differences between America’s situation in 1897 compared with 2025.
The McKinley Congressional Massacre
The McKinley Tariff was enacted by the Republican Congress in October 1890, halfway through Benjamin Harrison’s Republican presidency and a little over a month before the midterm elections. It raised tariffs on a wide array of household goods. The resulting predicted and real increase in the cost of living led to instant political catastrophe for Republicans. While the tariff was not the sole cause of the disaster, its scope was shocking. Republicans lost 93 of their 179 seats in the House, more than half of their caucus. They went overnight from a 179-152 majority to being outnumbered 238-86 by the Democrats (plus eight Populists, who were more aligned with the Democrats). Democrats won the national popular vote by eight points. McKinley even lost his own seat, partly due to an unfriendly redistricting, as the House caucus in Ohio flipped from 16–5 Republican to 14–7 Democrat.
McKinley bounced back swiftly, winning the Ohio governorship, but even a bipartisan committee report by Senate protectionists that tried to reassure the public that the cost of living hadn’t really risen was not enough to prevent voters from
doubling down in 1892. They threw Harrison out of office, brought back the free-trading Grover Cleveland, and delivered to Democrats their first trifecta of White House and congressional control in 32 years — since before the Civil War.
As Cleveland took office, the economy tumbled into the worst depression in American history before 1929. It would be unfair to pin the lion’s share of the blame for that on the McKinley tariff, which was partially repealed during the depression by the Wilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894. Still, it did nothing to fend off the collapse, which originated with overseas financial crises in France and Argentina and was driven in part by monetary factors. In fact, prices stagnated during this period due to depressed economic conditions, which is one reason why many of the nation’s farmers wanted inflationary cheaper money so that their income from selling crops could rise to keep up with their fixed obligations to repay debts.
The Wilson-Gorman Tariff was also no free-trade nirvana. Cleveland got a strong free-trade bill through the House, but Democrats in the Senate, while professedly free-trade in rhetoric, were protectionist in practice, adding over 600 amendments protecting particular favored products and industries. An appalled Cleveland refused to even sign the final product, although he could not afford to veto his party’s signature economic policy. The 1894 midterms went even more disastrously for Democrats than 1890 had for Republicans, headlined by a 110-seat swing in the House toward Republicans, from which House Democrats would not recover for 16 years.
Sound Money
Given the depression, the ominous midterm results, and a
massive schism among Democrats between the conservative gold-standard Cleveland and the upstart 36-year-old Free Silver populist
William Jennings Bryan, it is not surprising that once McKinley nailed down the Republican nomination in 1896, he had the upper hand. He won the presidency with a solid popular majority and carried the entire Northeast and Midwest. But while McKinley remained popularly identified with tariffs, the 1896 election wasn’t primarily waged on the basis of that issue; McKinley remade his political coalition by focusing on the divide between his gold standard platform and Bryan’s inflationary free-silver economics. In other words, McKinley rebranded himself as a champion of sound money and stable prices.
In office, McKinley was able to have it both ways on monetary policy: He kept the country on the gold standard and reassured northern business and labor interests that money would remain sound, but the money supply increased anyway after 1897 due to large gold discoveries and mining improvements, especially in South Africa. It’s an irony of the McKinley presidency that the great champion of tariffs was aided so much by imported gold.
McKinley again raised tariffs during his presidency. He signed the Dingley Act in mid-1897. He announced a reciprocal tariff policy on September 5, 1901, but was fatally shot the following day. It is true that the nation enjoyed an era of prosperity and rapid industrial growth under McKinley. And it is true that McKinley’s presidency was a great success in political terms as well, establishing a new Republican majority coalition that (despite a temporary schism that gave us Woodrow Wilson) dominated American politics between 1896 and 1932.
But the economic evidence is at best highly contested, and in the views of many economic historians, the tariffs did more harm than good. For example, a November 2024
working paper by Alexander Klein & Christopher Meissner for the National Bureau of Economic Research, which the authors summarize in a Cato Institute
column and
slides for the Hoover Institution. As they conclude:
Our research finds no evidence that higher US tariffs promoted labor productivity in the manufacturing sector. On the contrary, our findings suggest that tariffs reduced labor productivity. Therefore, tariffs played a minimal role in raising the US share of global manufacturing output during the Gilded Age. Additionally, tariffs induced the entry of firms that produced less output. The entry of these smaller, less productive firms may explain the reduction in average labor productivity. Moreover, reduced competition from imports may have discouraged US manufacturers from investing in new products and processes. . . .
Tariffs may have merely transferred money from consumers to manufacturers, potentially reducing societal well-being by raising the prices of inputs and final goods. . . . Industries with low barriers to entry that produced lower-quality products, such as textiles, increased their output, value-added, number of workers, and number of firms. But in other industries, tariffs appear to have reduced these variables, especially in industries where ownership was concentrated, such as processed foods and tobacco. (Emphasis added.)
In fact, by the time McKinley was succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt, the swift concentration of ownership in American industry ushered in an era of progressive politics in which monopolies and trusts were the most prominent issue in our politics.
A Different World
High tariffs in the America of 2025 are not the same as high tariffs in the America of 1897. There are a series of reasons why we cannot expect to reproduce, just by raising tariffs, the prosperous conditions of the McKinley presidency. Consider three big ones.
First, we have an income tax now. In 1890, tariffs were the main source of revenue for the federal government; virtually all federal tax revenue came either from tariffs or from excise taxes, also imposed on goods and services. There was no federal income tax, no payroll tax, and in many places, no state income tax, either. Moreover, federal spending went almost entirely to federal operations; we did not have the modern structure of grants by which federal collections are re-routed back to the states. Overall government taxation and spending were massively lower than they are today. Thus, it was easier for consumers to bear the price of taxes on goods without stifling economic activity because they were not being taxed so much at so many other points.
When Democrats cut the tariff in 1894, they introduced the nation’s first peacetime income tax to offset the revenue losses; it was struck down the following year by the Supreme Court. Even after the 16th Amendment overturned that decision and
Woodrow Wilson signed the revived income tax into law, peacetime rates remained very low until the 1930s.
Trump has no power to cut income taxes without Congress, and the congressional GOP isn’t proposing any sort of major income tax reduction to offset new tariffs. Thus, a high-tariff regime would simply be a net tax increase.
Second, McKinley’s presidency was a time of explosive population growth, fueled both by high domestic birthrates and mass immigration. The Census showed that the U.S. population grew 30.2 percent in the 1870s, 25.5 percent in the 1880s, 21 percent in the 1890s, and 21 percent in the 1900s. The decade that began with McKinley’s reelection would be the last in our history to see population growth exceed 20 percent. We dropped to single-digit growth in the 1980s and the 2000s, and to just 7.4 percent growth in the 2010s. That is on pace to be lower still in the 2020s.
America welcomed 230,832
new lawful residents in the first year of McKinley’s presidency. That’s about the same in proportion to the size of the population as we take in legally today. But under McKinley, the figure more than doubled by his last year in office. It skyrocketed under his successor, Teddy Roosevelt, to 1,285,349 new Americans in 1907, the third straight year above a million. That would be like taking in nearly 5 million people a year today (the recorded high of 1,826,595 came in 1991). The foreign-born population peaked at 14.8 percent in 1890 and 14.7 percent in 1910, figures unmatched until the Biden administration.
Not only were we importing a ton of working-age adults; they were coming to a country with no real social safety net, few people who lived long in retirement, and few laws against child labor. About the only Americans who were on the federal payroll without working were pensioned Civil War veterans, a population that was swiftly declining from the mid-1890s on. Thus, not only was the population growing three times faster than today, the raw numbers
understate the growth in the workforce relative to the share of the population that was not economically productive.
A nation with a swiftly expanding population of consumers and workers can find new internal markets and continuous growth without much foreign trade. But we are nowhere near those conditions today, and the Trump administration’s immigration policies (whatever their other merits) are headed in the opposite direction from recreating them.
Third, world trade was very different. Throughout the 19th century, Americans were playing catch-up industrially to Britain, which as the naval hegemon and the world’s leading industrial power was an aggressive supporter of free trade. The case for tariffs at the time (one already badly weakening by McKinley’s time) was that Americans
weren’t the dominant economic superpower that could afford to compete without protection. Trans-oceanic shipping was much more expensive then, and the economies of our immediate neighbors in Canada and Mexico (today, our top two trading partners) were much smaller. Multinational manufacturing supply chains, just-in-time delivery, and e-commerce were unheard of. While we can draw lessons about timeless economic principles from the past, we simply cannot so easily unscramble the egg of current economic reality to recreate the conditions of 1897.
There are arguments in favor of deploying tariffs today for some purposes particular to our own age, such as rebuilding our domestic defense-industrial base (which was robust in the late 19th century even during periods of peace) and unraveling the insidious leverage of a tyrannical Chinese regime in our society, especially in information technology. But those are today’s arguments for today’s problems. What we can’t do is resurrect the 1890s with Zombie McKinleyism.
