Monday, September 14, 2015
By Jordan Cohen
NILES
It was 114 years ago today that Niles native William McKinley, the nation’s 25th president, died of gunshot wounds from an assassin’s bullets in Buffalo, N.Y. In a ceremony Sunday at the National McKinley Memorial, Trumbull County Republicans and Democrats put aside partisanship to honor the late president’s legacy.
County Commissioner Dan Polivka, Trumbull Democratic chairman, said the quickly put together commemoration was spurred by the recent decision to change the name of Alaska’s Mount McKinley to Mount Denali, as it was originally referred to by native tribes before it bore McKinley’s name.
Alaskan political leaders have praised the change, while Ohio’s congressional representatives have condemned it.
“We’re hoping that if [the name change] isn’t reversed, then there will be a compromise,” said Polivka and his counterpart, county Republican chairman Randy Law. “We’d like to see it kept the way it was,” Law said.
Neither Polivka nor Law offered suggestions about the type of compromise they might find acceptable.
Several who attended had differing views about the name change.
“I don’t have a problem with it,” said JoAnne Collier of Boardman, a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. “I came here out of respect to the president.”
“I think it’s a shame that his memorial is being taken away from him,” countered Ben
Kulper of Howland. “He deserves more recognition for being a wartime president and because of his assassination.”
Mike Wilson of Champion, a “presidential presenter,” has acted as McKinley for 24 years. Dressed in clothing and a hat appropriate for the president’s era, Wilson read excerpts from a speech that McKinley gave in which the president predicted what the world would be like in September 2001, 100 years later. McKinley’s words were clearly prescient.
“Communications will [come] with the speed of rapid transit,” said Wilson as McKinley, “and the recently developed X-ray machine will revolutionize medicine.” The words were contained in a speech McKinley made at the Pan American Exhibition in Buffalo the day before he was shot.
Wilson noted that it was McKinley, a Republican, who established gold as the national monetary standard and worked on behalf of a national park system, which his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, brought to reality.
“We have so much to be proud of that Niles is the birthplace of a president and we have this memorial,” Law said. “We can easily come together when it’s good things to promote the Valley.”
Law and Polivka say they hope to make the ceremony an annual event.
More than 40 people attended the ceremony, which was moved indoors due to intermittent rain. Belles and Beaux, a high-school choir, sang the national anthem. Their high school: Niles McKinley.