The New “Era of Good Feeling”

With the second election of William McKinley, as all qualified observers had noted, we were fairly entered upon an era of good feeling in which the intensity of mere partisan spirit had quite disappeared, and [391][392] in which all sections of the country were happy, harmonious, and confident as at no previous time. Mr. McKinley had won the confidence and esteem of the Democratic South, which he had recently visited, and he was beloved from Maine to California. It was not that he could be spared;—yet the historians of the future will probably agree that his death came at a rare moment of culmination, when his policies had been vindicated and accepted, and his high rank among American statesmen had been unassailably achieved. The truth of this was made plain in the hearty and unanimous outburst of approval with which the country received President Roosevelt’s assurance, on taking the oath of office, that it was his intention to carry out absolutely the policies of his predecessor. Those men and newspapers, indeed, which only a little time before had been habitually in opposition to the policies of President McKinley were foremost in praising President Roosevelt for adopting those very policies as his own. And there was almost, if not quite, equal unanimity of approval when, a few days afterward, it became known that President Roosevelt had not only asked all the members of the McKinley cabinet to retain their portfolios for the present, but had absolutely refused to allow them to go through the formality of offering their resignations, and had assured them that in so doing he meant in all sincerity to invite and urge them to remain in office throughout the entire term, or as long as they would have remained if there had been no change in the Presidency.