The accession of Hipólito Yrigoyen to the office of President of Argentina on 12 October, 1916, was the long-awaited climax to a quest for political power that had begun 25 years earlier with the founding of the Unión Cívica Radical. Since 1891 the UCR or Radical Party, as it is usually called, had been condemned to the status of an opposition party, its leaders waiting impatiently for their chance to uproot completely what they deemed to be the corruption and mismanagement of the régimen, their pejorative term for the conservative establishment that had dominated Argentine political life for decades.