Democratic candidate, but the "paramount issue" of his campaign
had changed since four years before from free silver to
anti-imperialism. President McKinley, according to his custom,
made no active campaign; but Bryan and Roosevelt competed with
each other in whirlwind speaking tours from one end of the
country to the other. The war-cry of the Republicans was the
"full dinner pail"; the keynote of Bryan's bid for popular
support was opposition to the Republican policy of expansion and
criticism of Republican tendencies toward plutocratic control.
The success of the Republican ticket was overwhelming; McKinley
and Roosevelt received nearly twice as many electoral votes as
Bryan and Stevenson.

When President McKinley was shot at Buffalo six months after his
second term began, it looked for a time as though he would
recover. So Roosevelt, after an immediate visit to Buffalo, went
to join his family in the Adirondacks. The news of the
President's impending death found him out in the wilderness on
the top of Mount Tahawus, not far from the tiny Lake
Tear-of-the-Clouds, the source of the Hudson River. A ten-mile
dash down the mountain trail, in the course of which he
outstripped all his companions but one; a wild forty-mile drive
through the night to the railroad, the new President and his
single companion changing the horses two or three times with
their own hands; a fast journey by special train across the
State--and on the evening of September 14, 1901, Theodore
Roosevelt took the oath of office as the twenty-sixth President
of the United States.

Before taking the oath, Roosevelt announced that it would be his