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Title: An argument, not a biography or history
Review: Phillips is a political commentator, not a historian or biographer. His goal with this book isn't to sketch in McKinley's life but to argue a thesis. His thesis is that McKinley was a important president, and the thing that makes him important is that he illustrates Phillips' career-making mega-theory about realignment politics. It's a campaign strategist's view of history.Phillips doesn't seem to have consulted any primary sources at all. We get a lot of "he must have reflected" stuff, and assertions that McKinley deliberately wore a mask of conventionality, and that his blandness was a conscious strategy, etc., with no attempt to demonstrate the historical validity of any of it.Still, there is some good stuff about Ohio's political centrality in the post-Civil War era, and a very good summary of the gold-silver debate, which was a matter of passionate interest in the 1880s and 1890s but is so baffling to modern Americans.
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