American Propaganda
McKinley Was Right, 1900 US poster: Lithograph poster showing McKinley and a second man in front of a large flag

McKinley Was Right (poster: 1896 poverty, 1900 prosperity)

Idle chimneys and smoking ones: the McKinley Was Right poster of 1900

A 1900 Chicago lithograph sets 1896 idle factories against 1900 smoking chimneys under "McKinley Was Right." Before-and-after as an argument.

Techniques named on the archive record

Card stackingGlittering generalities
Date
1900
Made by
Pro-McKinley campaign poster (lithographers Edwards, Deutsch & Heitmann, Chicago)
Medium
Poster
Country
United States
Regime
Mckinley Administration
Source
Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
Source
Library of Congress , retrieved October 2, 2026
Source
Public domain (published 1900; Library of Congress rights advisory: no known restrictions on publication) Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records.

Full record at propagandaarchive.org

A 1900 lithograph poster for McKinley's re-election, printed by Edwards, Deutsch & Heitmann of Chicago, sets "1896 Poverty Depression" with idle factories against "1900 Prosperity" with smoking chimneys, and ends on "Prosperity at home, prestige abroad, sound money."

What the poster shows

McKinley and a second man stand before a large flag. To the left, under a heading for 1896, factories sit idle. To the right, under a heading for 1900, the chimneys smoke and a crowd cheers. McKinley holds a scroll that reproduces another poster, "The Real Issue." The slogan line at the bottom gives three goods in a row.

1896 POVERTY DEPRESSION
ONE COUNTRY ONE FLAG
McKINLEY WAS RIGHT
1900 PROSPERITY
THE REAL ISSUE [on the scroll]
PROSPERITY AT HOME, PRESTIGE ABROAD, SOUND MONEY.

Who made it

The archive credits the poster to the pro-McKinley campaign and the lithographers Edwards, Deutsch & Heitmann of Chicago. It dates to 1900, McKinley's re-election year. The Library of Congress catalog notes a variant of the same design with a different slogan.

How to read it

The archive tags it for card stacking and glittering generalities, and the layout explains both. Two years are set side by side, one bad and one good, and the poster asks the eye to read the gap between them as the president's doing. Whether it was is a question a poster cannot settle, and this one does not try. Whatever else happened in the economy between 1896 and 1900 is outside the frame.

The slogan is the generality. "Prestige abroad" is the only phrase on the sheet that touches the war with Spain and the islands taken after it, which were the other argument of 1900. The anti-imperialist side of that argument does not appear, and a voter reading only this poster would not know there was one.

Incumbents still argue this way. It is fair to claim a record. It is card stacking to claim a cause from two pictures. The silver side had its own version four years earlier: the Bryan and Sewall broadside put a coin between its two candidates and let the coin do the arguing.

Sources

  • FRAME object record, McKinley Was Right (poster: 1896 poverty, 1900 prosperity), 1900. Pro-McKinley campaign poster; lithographers Edwards, Deutsch & Heitmann, Chicago.
  • Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. loc.gov/item/2002719964, retrieved by the archive 2 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain; no known restrictions on publication.