The Republican nominee in 1896 was William McKinley, of Ohio, best known as the framer of the McKinley tariff bill.  Born in Ohio in 1843, he had served through the Civil War, had been a member of Congress and twice governor of Ohio.  He was a thorough party man, and modified his former views on the silver question to conform with the platform on which he was nominated; his campaign manager, Mark Hanna, was one of the most astute politicians the country had ever produced, and raised a campaign fund of unprecedented magnitude; all of which, combined with the disintegration of the Democratic party, gave McKinley a notable victory.

The great event of his first administration was the war with Spain, undertaken to free Cuba, into which McKinley, be it said to his credit, was driven unwillingly by public clamor, cunningly fostered by a portion of the press.  Its close saw the purchase of the Philippines, and the entrance of the United States upon a colonial policy believed by many to be wholly contrary to the spirit of its founders.

There was never any question of McKinley’s renomination, for his prestige and personal popularity were immense, and his victory was again decisive.  He had broadened rapidly, had gained in statesmanship, had acquired a truer insight into the country’s needs, and was now freed, to a great extent, from party obligations.  Great hopes were built upon his second administration, and they would no doubt have been fulfilled, in part at least; but a few months after his inauguration, he was shot through the body by an irresponsible anarchist while holding a public reception at Buffalo, and died within the week.  The years which have elapsed since his death enable us to view him more calmly than was possible while he lived, and the country has come to recognize in him an honest and well-meaning man, of more than ordinary ability, who might have risen to true statesmanship and won for himself a high place in the country’s history had he been spared.

On the ticket with McKinley, a young New Yorker named Theodore Roosevelt had been elected Vice-President.  Roosevelt had long been prominent in his native state as an enthusiastic reformer, had made a sensational record in the war with Spain, and, on his return home, had been elected governor by popular clamor, rather than by the will of the politicians, to whom his rough-and-ready methods were extremely repugnant.  So when the national convention was about to be held, they conceived the great idea of removing him from state politics and putting him on the shelf, so to speak, by electing him Vice-President, and the plan was carried out in spite of Roosevelt’s protests.  Alas for the politicians!  It was with a sort of poetic justice that he took the oath as President on the day of McKinley’s death, September 14, 1901, while they were still rubbing their eyes and wondering what had happened.