From The Wall Street Journal’s Notable & Quotable:
From “McKinley’s Greatest Monument,” an editorial about President William McKinley, in the New York Sun, Aug. 30:
Our own interest in the matter lies with McKinley. We have no particular objection to, per se, Denali. That’s the name for the summit used by Alaskan Natives and, in recent years, also the federal name for the park. It’s the name the state’s senior senator, Lisa Murkowski, sought to attach to the mountain via legislation she earlier this year introduced, to no effect. Legislators from Ohio understood better, and moved to block the measure. William McKinley may never have been to the mountain, but he was an important and assassinated president.
Maybe some day a Republican president will restore to John Fitzgerald Kennedy International Airport the name of Idlewild, which is the name us native New Yorkers use for the airport (Idlewild is still a permitted reference for the airport in the “Reporters Handbook and Manual of Style of the New York Sun”). We could see the logic of it in an age of hyper-sensitivity to local sentiments. But we would object were a president to simply rename the airport after Congress had been asked and decided not to act.
In any event, let us raise a salute to Wm. McKinley. From his front porch in 1896, he ran one of the most remarkable campaigns in American history, defeating the Democrat,William Jennings Bryan, who ran for the free coinage of silver—a campaign of inflation—by attacking the Jews. It was one of the few anti-Semitic campaigns in American history. McKinley defeated it handily and gained passage in 1900 of the Gold Standard Act, which set the stage for the great boom of the 20th century. It’s a monument as majestic as the peak of Denali.