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Many commentators have quoted and made use of a statement by Theodore Roosevelt-that President William McKinley had "no more backbone than a chocolate éclair. " Three uses of the quotation are reviewed here raising questions about the adequacy of the sources, the context, and the plausibility of that judgment.
Theodore Roosevelt is known for his forceful expressions and pungent wit. One of his most cited statements is a description of President William McKinley-he "has no more backbone than a chocolate éclair."
For much of the twentieth century, McKinley was portrayed as a man of limited ability. Historians, biographers, and political commentators cast doubt on his capacities, describing him as weak, indecisive, feckless, and so forth. Roosevelt's éclair quotation would then cap the argument, providing a useful and colorful summary. The judgment, after all, was provided by an intelligent man, one who as assistant secretary of the Navy would have been knowledgeable, an astute observer of the president and his performance.
For roughly six decades, the portrait of McKinley as weak and vacillating dominated much of the relevant literature. This view appeared, complete with the backbone statement, in Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, probably the most influential American history textbook ever published (1927, 2: 372). They give the context as April 1898. They provide no source.1
Later, however, with the biographies of Margaret Leech (1959, 35-36, 233-34), Wayne Morgan (2003 [1963], 210-11, 222, 254, 361, 364; also Morgan 1966), and Lewis L. Gould (1980, 88-90), a different reading came to prevail, these accounts portraying McKinley as a cautious decision maker and as operating with considerable intelligence and capacity. Several other historians have reviewed relevant materials and they too support the revised reading (see Holbo 1967; Fry 1979; Hilderbrand 1981; Gould 1985; and Smith 1993).
In a recent study, three groups of experts, professors of history, law, and political science, were asked to rate the nation's first forty presidents. McKinley was ranked as number 14, putting him in the "above average" category, coming just after John Adams and just before James Madison and James Monroe. There was a remarkable consensus among the three groups of raters, their rankings, respectively, being 15, 14, and 13 (Taranto and Leo 2004, 253-54,...