🎩William McKinley

25th President · 1897–1901 · Republican

William McKinley presided over America's emergence as a world power. He won the 1896 election against William Jennings Bryan in a fight over gold versus silver. He led the United States to victory in the Spanish-American War, acquiring the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam — and making Cuba an American protectorate. He was assassinated in Buffalo in September 1901, the third U.S. president to be killed in office.

Front-Porch Campaign

McKinley was an Ohio congressman for 14 years and then two-term governor of Ohio. His 1896 campaign is legendary: he stayed on his front porch in Canton while his manager Mark Hanna ran the first modern, heavily-financed presidential campaign. Some 750,000 visitors came to McKinley's porch. He defeated Bryan by supporting the gold standard at a time when Bryan championed the free coinage of silver.

Spanish-American War

The explosion of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in February 1898 — cause unknown, but blamed on Spain by a fevered press — pushed the United States into war. The Spanish-American War lasted only four months and ended with Spanish cession of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, along with Cuban independence. The war made the United States a Pacific empire and gave Theodore Roosevelt his Rough Riders fame.

Gold Standard and Imperialism

McKinley signed the Gold Standard Act in 1900, formally placing U.S. currency on gold. He also annexed Hawaii in 1898 and committed the country to suppressing the Philippine-American War — a three-year counterinsurgency that cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Filipino lives.

Assassination in Buffalo

On September 6, 1901, while greeting visitors at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, McKinley was shot twice at close range by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. He died eight days later of gangrene in his wounds. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt — added to the ticket the previous year partly to get him out of the New York governor's mansion — became president at 42, the youngest in American history.

McKinley Trivia

• McKinley was the last Civil War veteran to serve as president.
• He appears on the $500 bill (no longer in circulation).
• Alaska's Denali was officially called Mount McKinley for 98 years before being renamed in 2015.
• McKinley's last words, to his wife, were "Goodbye, goodbye all. It is God's way. His will be done."

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