McKinley-Roosevelt - Button

25th President of the United States, and the last veteran of the American Civil War to be elected to the office. He was the last President to serve in the nineteenth century and the first to serve in the twentieth. The 1896 election is often considered a realigning election that marked the beginning of the Progressive Era. McKinley presided over a return to prosperity after the Panic of 1893. He launched the Spanish-American War, widely popular due to the efforts of the yellow press, using the pretext of Spanish atrocities in Cuba. Later he annexed the former Spanish territories of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, and set up a protectorate over Cuba. He also presided over the annexation of the formerly independant Kingdom of Hawaii. McKinley was reelected in the 1900 presidential election after an intense campaign versus William Jennings Bryan, this one focused on foreign policy. After McKinley's assassination in 1901 by an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz, he was succeeded by Vice President Theodore Roosevelt.