By Stuart Mitchner

McKinley hollered, McKinley squalled
Doctor said, “McKinley, death is on the wall…”

Bob Dylan put President McKinley back in the national consciousness a few years ago in his song “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” taking the first line from Charlie McCoy’s “White House Blues,” except in McCoy’s version the second line was “Doc said to McKinley, ‘I can’t find that ball,’ “ meaning the second of two bullets fired at close range into the president’s abdomen on September 6, 1901. It happened at the Temple of Music on the grounds of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. McKinley died on September 14, 1901, a hundred years to the week of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

A New York City surgeon named Charles McBurney, whose discovery of the diagnostic spot for appendicitis is known as McBurney’s Point, was blamed for misleading the press and public with his claim on September 10 that McKinley was “out of danger.” McCoy lets him off the hook by simply having the Doc say “Mr. McKinley, better pass in your checks / You’re bound to die, bound to die.”

After the current president put McKinley’s name back in play on January 20, I checked history.com, which says the highest peak in North America was actually first named Mount McKinley in 1896 by a gold prospector celebrating McKinley’s recent capture of the Republican nomination for president; the name stuck and became official in 1917. In 2015, the Obama administration renamed the mountain Denali, a name the Alaskans had historically championed, which translates “roughly to ‘The Great One.’ “

Illustrious Twenty-Niners

Why am I writing about McKinley? It’s not just that he happened to be born on January 29, the publication date of this issue. Other members of the January 29 group include philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg (1688), revolutionary Thomas Paine (1737), author Anton Chekhov (1860), composer Frederick Delius (1862), comedian W.C. Fields (1880), and film director Ernst Lubitsch (1892). Born in 1843 in Niles, Ohio, McKinley was a popular and productive president (1896-1901). According to his wikipedia page, he led a realignment that made the Republican party largely dominant in the industrial states and nationwide for decades; presided over victory in the Spanish-American war of 1898; gained control of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, restored prosperity after a deep depression, rejected the inflationary monetary policy of free silver, kept the nation on the gold standard, and raised protective tariffs.

What stirred my curiosity, however, was a relatively offhand reference to his only term at Allegheny College, from which he returned in 1860 “after becoming ill and depressed.” What happened during that term at Allegheny? Apparently he was a model student, excellent debater, serious reader, and fancy dresser, and the wiki photo of him at 15 suggests a hint of boyish wildness (look at that flaring tie) that accords with the story that he once led a cow up the stairs of Bentley Hall. Another version of the myth says it was a goat and that he left it in a classroom.

Yet it’s thanks to this depressed student prankster that a volume of Shakespeare sits on my desk next to a copy of E.L. Konigsburg’s Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth (Atheneum 1967), surely one the longest, strangest titles in children’s literature. For reasons I’m about to disclose, I was glad for an excuse to reread the witch’s scenes from Macbeth, which Jennifer, the 12-year-old authority on Hecate, quotes from, after looking up at the sky and asking her apprentice Elizabeth, “What’s the matter, didn’t you ever read Macbeth?”

Melville’s Shakespeare

It seems that even less is known about McKinley’s time at Mount Union College in Alliance Ohio, where he also “studied” and later served on the Board of Trustees. The volume of Shakespeare on my desk belongs to a set I bought from a book dealer in Ohio after a decades long quest. On the inside front cover of each of the seven volumes is the bookplate of the Mount Union College Library, marked “Withdrawn” in red. In spite of the conventional “ex-library” stigma, the set, published in 1836, is in immaculate condition and occupies a place of honor in my study.

In fact, this Shakespeare would be among the books I’d take with me to the proverbial “desert island” because it comes from same printing Herman Melville read and annotated prior to the creation of Moby Dick — “an edition in glorious great type, every letter whereof is a soldier, & the top of every ‘t’ like a musket barrel.” Writing to a publisher friend in 1849, Melville admits “I am mad to think how minute a cause has prevented me hitherto from reading Shakespeare. But until now, any copy that was come-atable to me, happened to be in a vile small print, unendurable to my eyes, which are tender as young sparrows. But chancing to fall in with this glorious edition, I now exult over it, page after page.”

McKinley Is a School

McKinley’s legendary student pranks have something in common with Konigsburg’s Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, first and foremost because the McKinley in the title refers to the William McKinley Elementary School, where Jennifer and Elizabeth are fifth-grade students. But the tasks Jennifer assigns to Elizabeth as part of her witch apprenticeship (involving spells, pricked fingers, blood bonds, raw eggs, toads and cauldrons) have a significance far beyond mere pranks. Above all, Konigsburg is writing about the evolution of a friendship that Macbeth very nearly destroys when the moment comes to drop a toad named Hilary Ezra into a “cauldron” of flaming Crisco.

I don’t have time to do justice to Konigsburg’s Newberry Honor book, the first of her many publications. Released the same year as her next book, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (winner of the 1968 Newberry Medal), its most striking feature is not that a fifth grader is quoting freely from Macbeth, but that nothing is made of the fact that the little girl doing it is African American. That’s because the book is from Elizabeth’s point of view and her friend’s race is taken for granted. Although Konigsburg’s illustrations subtly indicate as much, it’s not until page 56, during a school play, that Elizabeth notices that Jennifer’s mother was “the only Black mother there.”

Questions

I have lots of questions, although none about the significance of a book with this unforced depiction of an interracial friendship in which the Black girl is seemingly the all-powerful master of the scene. The book came out in 1967, two years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Another question I’m asking myself is why name the school William McKinley, and why cram his name into an already charmingly cumbersome title? The UK edition deleted it. A related question concerns the location of the school, which is apparently in a suburb north of New York, with many commuters heading in and out of the city every day. Another indicator of the city’s proximity is that Elizabeth totes her witchcraft implements in a Bloomingdale’s bag.

Some checking online took me to a P.S. 63 William McKinley in the East Village, which in 2011 was seeking to change its name to the S.T.A.R. Academy after more than a hundred years as McKinley. Next I found a JHS 259 William McKinley on the Fort Hamilton Parkway in Brooklyn, where 76 percent of the students scored at or above the proficiency level for reading and 68 percent for math. The minority enrollment is 75 percent. Probably the most impressive website, also in Brooklyn, is for The Pride of Bay Ridge, a Title 1 McKinley Middle School (I.S. 259) in its third year as a Recognition School.

Losses

McKinley’s wife Ida also makes an appearance in Charlie McCoy’s song :”Look-it here you rascal, you see what you’ve done / You’ve shot my husband with that Iver-Johnson gun / Carry me back to Washington.” She was by her husband’s side when he died. Married in January 1871, the couple had two daughters, one died in infancy, the other at four. Ida’s health eventually deteriorated due to phlebitis and undiagnosed epilepsy, and during their time in the White House, she often needed sedation to enable her to sit through official functions as First Lady. Even Bob Dylan couldn’t build a song around losses and sorrows like that. But he did something comparable in “Murder Most Foul,” the second disc in Rough and Rowdy Ways. Using Macbeth for his title, he played the DJ for an epic hand-held film of the Kennedy assassination, a double-bill with McKinley’s on the first disc, fit for a showing at the Temple of Music.