CHAPTER X Mark Hanna THE POLITICO

MARK HANNA was born in the same year as J. Pierpont Morgan and two years before John D. Rockefeller. The shadows of these men, merged into one monstrous silhouette, brooded over the American scene for more than half a century. As Morgan dominated the financial life of the nation and Rockefeller gave direction to its industrial life, Hanna became the molder of those political forms proper to the age of Big Business.

The political control that took its rise with the rise of these men came to a pause—a dark, disordered, and even terrifying pause—in 1933. Hanna’s assumption of national boss-ship in 1896 constituted a kind of initial invasion, in which big business broke into the government. The businessman in politics was, of course, always a familiar figure. If there were Carnegies and Fricks and Elkins and Keans and Blisses in the Republican Party, there were no lack of Belmonts and Whitneys and Paynes among their Democratic opponents. But up to the time of McKinley these businessmen were applicants at the hands of the politicians. Rich men might seek juicy favors from the state, but always they were supposed to send someone a check.

From the day of the United States Bank down to the wholesale traffic in congressmen by Oakes Ames and the Crédit Mobilier, businessmen had bought Senators and congressmen, legislators and aldermen. The technique that governed the relations of businessman and politician was that of corruption, bribery, and flattery. Always there have been statesmen like Disraeli in England and McKinley in America who knew how to varnish over the acceptance of benefices at the hands of some rich Maecenas. Thus these bankers and industrialists exercised great influence in the state, but they did not master it. There had been plenty of Albert B. Falls but no Andrew Mellons. Of course the businessman in politics was not new. There have been businessmen holding positions of power since Nicias in Athens and Crassus in Rome. It went farther in England than anywhere. She had had the rich textile manufacturer, Sir Robert Peel, as premier, and Cobbett had referred with scorn to the large number of seats in Parliament purchased by county bankers. But it had not proceeded to that point in America.

With the advent of Mark Hanna came a change. Grover Cleveland’s first Cabinet contained Thomas F. Bayard, a great Senator, as Secretary of State; Lucius Q. C. Lamar, a professor of mathematics and economics, as Secretary of the Interior; William Crowninshield Endicott, a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, as Secretary of War; William F. Vilas, a professor of law, as Postmaster General; Augustus H. Garland, a statesman or politician rather than corporation lawyer, as Attorney General; John G. Carlisle, former Speaker of the House, as Secretary of the Treasury. William C. Whitney, millionaire lawyer and agent of powerful New York banking and utility interests, in the Navy Department, was a solitary exception.

McKinley’s first Cabinet, on the other hand, included Russell A. Alger, an enormously wealthy lumberman; Lyman J. Gage, president of the First National Bank of Chicago; James A. Gary, a rich textile manufacturer; and Cornelius N. Bliss, New York banker. Wealthy manufacturers and merchants and rentiers were slowly to replace in the Senate, the Cabinet, and diplomatic service, and finally in the presidency itself, the professional politicians. And this was to go on until, on March 4, 1929, as this confused era moved into its latest stage, a millionaire businessman President, surrounded by a Cabinet of millionaire businessmen, took over immediately and directly the reins of the government, with a commercial banker at the Court of St. James, an investment banker in Italy, a utility magnate in Berlin, an advertising man in Paris, a steelmaker in Spain, and millionaire businessmen in almost all the capitals of the world.

The process was completed when in October, 1929, we heard Gabriel over Wall Street and the President, as that fateful premonitory shiver ran through our economic structure, summoned around him the College of Captains. At that moment, every phase of our life was in the hands of businessmen. The test for their power was at hand and, led by a great engineer and great industrial ministers of state, these bankers and manufacturers and utility magnates were to seize the depression in its infancy and crush it. In that hour the Great God Business might be said to have become supreme, even though the very earth shook under the images of the idol.

It was Herbert Hoover’s melancholy destiny to be the last inheritor of the scepter that Mark Hanna forged. For it was this wholesale grocer and iron and coal merchant, street-railway baron and banker of Cleveland, who was the first masterful instrument of usurpation by business, self-righteous and unquestioning, with ample cash and a profound respect for its power to keep the cinders pouring from the smokestacks of God and the seats of the mighty filled with men who could understand a smokestack. He drifted into politics in almost the same way business drifted into politics. And he became almost overnight the very symbol of big business ruling the government. The cartoonist, Davenport, seized upon his countenance and figure, decked him out in dollar-marked plaids and made him the type of the lawless baron crushing the lowly. But if Davenport had not done this, some other artist would have adopted that round, lusty face, with its strong jaws and low gable and the whole strong, portly figure. And to this day the caricaturist, aiming a shot at arrogant and despotic business, will, almost without realizing it, move his pencil into the lines of Davenport’s devastating cartoon.

Hanna moved into power at the moment when big business put to work for its own purposes the cherished doctrine of individualism. Certain aggressive men had begun to expand their power out of all proportion to their natural endowment. They learned how to arm themselves with machines, to absorb the combined resources of many individuals through the corporate form, and thus to become, beside their lesser rivals, almost monstrous beings. Few men could hope to assume such armaments. But there were plenty of pious and complacent statesmen like the McKinleys and Hays and Roots to remind the people who cried out against these half-understood giants that any attempt to disarm the monsters would be a blow at the hardy cult of individualism. It was a merry invention to which Hanna gave his fullest assent. As the years wore on even many conservative observers of the swelling spectacle of big business began to see there was something askew in this notion of individualism, until Herbert Hoover arrived on the scene, and with the authority of the presidency behind him, invoked once more this discarded fetish and blessed it with the name of Rugged. The journals of apology took it up eagerly and proceeded to explain to little Jack that the Giant was an individual just like himself—though perhaps a trifle more rugged.

In every age the rich businessman has had a collection of weapons or tools with which to work. From earliest times men had been fashioning these tools. They got down to serious business in the development of this arsenal in the days of the Florentine bankers and the Augsburg merchants. In the chapter on Robert Owen we saw that as early as 1837 most of the weapons of that thing called “finance capitalism,” for want of a better name, had been in use at least in rudimentary forms in Boston and Lowell. But now they were far more clearly understood by some men. Men like Rockefeller and Morgan could not use those weapons fully and freely save by friendly collaboration with the state, by legal authorizations, and by the creation of a benevolent legal and public mood upon which they could float safely. Hanna it was, more than anyone, who organized the political shell within which this new capitalism could function safely. And this he was able to do because he had first made himself rich and then, through the leisure that fortune gave him, dedicated his large abilities to political life.

Hanna held fast to the theory of prosperity by percolation. That, of course, was no new conception. The feudal lord enabled the elements of his strength to sift down to his vassals and their villeins. The Southern slave owner believed he was the divinely appointed wide end of the funnel through which blessings flowed down to his Negro hands, just as the haughty coal baron, George Baer, believed that God appointed the anthracite mine owners as the generators of the favors that dripped down upon the half-starved coal miners of Pennsylvania. Had Hanna been President when the depression arrived he would have convoked the College of Captains; he would have summoned the employers to be good to their workers and not to cut wages; he would have organized the Reconstruction Finance Corporation; and as the structure continued to crumble despite all these braces built around the roof, he would have wondered what evil and mysterious mischance defeated all these perfectly obvious and wise measures.

Mark Hanna was born September 24, 1837, in New Lisbon, Ohio. At the time, his grandfather, Robert Hanna, with his tall, industrious sons, were the rich men of New Lisbon, where they ruled a wholesale and retail grocery business. It was a strong breed—Virginia Hicksite Quakers and Vermont Presbyterians—bent on getting along, worshiping law, hating slavery, liquor, and disorder, keeping out of public affairs, minding strictly their own business.

Mark Hanna’s education was of the most immature sort. As a lusty, rosy-cheeked boy he attended the public grammar school in the basement of the Presbyterian Church in New Lisbon. When the family moved to Cleveland he attended grammar school and then the Central High, where John D. Rockefeller was one of his classmates. Neither shone at school. Hanna, in particular, was twenty years old before he struggled to the end of the simple course of Central High with boys two to four years his junior. Then he went to Western Reserve College, only to be ejected after a few months for some harmless prank. After this he obeyed his own desires and put on a pair of overalls as a roustabout on the River Street docks in his father’s prosperous grocery business.

After a brief novitiate as a roustabout, Hanna moved up to a clerkship in the grocery business of Hanna, Garretson & Company, then as a purser on one of its lake steamers, then as a traveling salesman, and then as a part of the general management of the enterprise. The world of affairs in Cleveland first became aware of this robust youth when in his twenties he became a familiar figure in River Street—a stocky, thick-chested, large-shouldered, virile young man, with huge, alert brown eyes and a heavy bush of matted beard along the edges of his powerful jaw. The upper lip was clean-shaven after the manner of the time.

When the war came, like the Rockefellers and Morgans and Wanamakers and other sensible businessmen of the time, he knew the Union was safe as long as the supply of common labor held out for drafting. At the close of the war he was drafted into service for a few brief months as a second lieutenant to help repel General Jubal Early’s raid upon the Capital. It must be said for him, however, that after the war he did not join the G.A.R. and exhibit himself at campfires until near the end of his life, when the pressure of politics and the power of the American Legion of that day forced him in.

The remainder of his business career is soon told. From the grocery business he went into oil and then into the development of steamships on the lake. Then he married the daughter of Daniel Rhodes, a pioneer in coal and iron business on the Lakes. Soon after he was in his father-in-law’s firm, and when the old man died Hanna dominated it and changed its name to M. A. Hanna & Company, with his brothers as partners. They became large miners and dealers in coal, iron ore, and pig iron, owners of a fleet of steamers, and finally builders of ships. Thus he amassed a fortune and when he died left an estate valued at seven million dollars.

There were two interesting features in his business career. One was the variety of his interests. Unlike Rockefeller, who stuck with dogged singleness of purpose to his last, Hanna had to have his irons in many fires. He bought and ran a newspaper, owned a theater, organized and headed a bank, and became one of the two leading street-railway magnates of Cleveland. The other point of interest lay in this little-considered fact: while he was regarded as the representative of big business and great corporations, Hanna himself did not commit his own fortunes to the corporate form. His business was and remained until after his death a partnership. And while it grew and spread to many allied lines—ships and railroads and coke and blast furnaces—some of which were actually incorporated, they were old-fashioned corporations, closely held, really incorporated partnerships. Hanna, like Rockefeller, and unlike Morgan and Rogers and Gould and many other contemporaries, never used other people’s money. He was a builder and developer—a sound and able businessman, who accumulated a large fortune and ended by losing interest altogether in acquiring any more.

In 1896 after McKinley’s nomination, when the convention rose and called for Hanna, the “kingmaker,” and the thick-chested, rugged, smiling Clevelander mounted the platform, the newspapers hailed him as a newcomer in politics and as the businessman who had turned boss and routed the veterans Platt and Quay and Reed. The dramatization pleased the press, but Hanna was no tyro. He was a political leader at least as experienced as any man in the convention.

He began his career as a businessman. Until he was forty he took little active interest in politics. As it fell out, in the middle ’seventies an important phenomenon was shaping itself in American political life, the effects of which survive to this day. The party of Lincoln, fresh from the exalted evangel against human slavery, was being made into the party of that new thing, Big Business. This was the work of chance. The war had made the Republican party supreme in the North. Big Business was stretching out and challenging all sorts of old-fashioned rights. The railroads were in continual collusion with state governments. Oil, sugar, iron, coal corporations were moving ruthlessly back and forth across state frontiers. Gas companies and street-railway corporations had to appeal to city governments for the use of the streets. All the businessmen behind these enterprises, like practical managers, made their peace with the political party that was in power. And this chanced to be the Republican party. When the Democratic party returned to power in the South and some of the great cities of the East, the same elements could be found collaborating with their Democratic allies. Hanna’s own interest in politics had been for years quite casual. He could be found around the polls on Election Day and at ward meetings with the “better element,” throwing his weight on the side of “good government.”

It was not until 1878 that he found a good personal business reason for moving actively in politics. At this time business and politics were two separate estates. Their edges touched. Some members in each estate flowed freely over the other’s boundaries and sometimes it was a little difficult to tell whether this one was a businessman in politics or a politician in business. One of the best-known highways between these two states of business and politics was the little old-fashioned horsecar railway. And it was on this line that Mark Hanna rode finally into the world of the politicians.

Hanna’s father-in-law, Daniel Rhodes, was part owner of a little fifteen-mile horsecar line in Cleveland that ran over the viaduct to the Public Square. It was managed by Rhodes’ partner, Elias Sims, a hard-bitten old steamboatman, who was president of the company. Of course, old Elias Sims quarreled continually with the city authorities. Aldermen had learned early how to grant competing franchises to political friends to be sold out to the existing roads. Of course, old Sims had to keep en rapport with the Cleveland fathers. “All councilmen want,” he complained, “is money. Have to go round with my pocketbook in my hand all the time.”

When Daniel Rhodes died in 1875, Hanna assumed the management of his wife’s interests. And immediately his interest in politics bristled. But it was not until 1879 that he became a director of the road and collaborated directly with Sims in its management.

Immediately Hanna confronted a new figure rising in Cleveland—a figure destined to make a generous contribution to the gaiety of the city. This was Tom L. Johnson. Johnson had begun almost as a youth with a single horsecar and had built up a prosperous streetcar line. He and Sims were in continual warfare. And Hanna was quickly drawn in. Between Hanna and Johnson there was an impassable gulf. Johnson was a huge, portly but powerful, dynamic, generous-minded man, quite as full of combat as Hanna. Both started in business and ended in politics. But Hanna was always the businessman in politics; Johnson, the politician in business. Hanna was profoundly satisfied with the world as he found it. Johnson was no less profoundly dissatisfied. Johnson became the leader in Cleveland’s street railways. But in the midst of his success, a copy of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty fell into his hands. When he had read it he rose up as completely converted as Saul of Tarsus. Henceforth he became a valiant warrior for George’s single-tax theory and for other popular reforms in government. In the end he sold out his railway interests, went to Congress, became Mayor of Cleveland, and achieved fame by his celebrated crusade for municipal ownership and the three-cent fare.

He soon came to embody the spirit of revolt against control by the corrupt utility interests, while Mark Hanna became no less the symbol of that control. These two men fought for over two decades in Cleveland and Ohio. And this long warfare began as Hanna joined Sims in the direction of the little horsecar line. Johnson and Sims went through one of their numerous battles over a franchise. Johnson won and Hanna, who hated defeat, was furious. He hurried to old Sims and, glowering at him with his huge brown eyes and shaking his long chin whiskers, demanded that Sims buy him out or sell. Sims sold and Hanna became sole ruler of the little line.

Before long Hanna found himself facing the pushing Johnson in another fight. The river cut Cleveland in two sections. Johnson’s line ran on one side of the river. He proposed to acquire a line on the other side, unite the two, and give a continuous ride across town for a nickel. He needed a new franchise for this, and before the council he found Hanna bitterly contesting the plan. All his life Mark Hanna stood against any cuts in the revenues of business. Years later his first battle in the Senate was to protect the steel trust’s efforts to squeeze an extortionate price out of the government for armor plate. This Hanna-Johnson fight waxed hot. At every session of the council, the squat, square-shouldered, burly figure of the coal, iron, banker, and utility magnate could be seen in the chamber, buttonholing members, hammering his cane on the floor, expostulating violently with them. Two days before the final vote Johnson got a summons from old Elias Sims to visit him. Sims told Johnson he controlled two votes in the council and that these would be delivered to Johnson. “Why?” asked the astonished Johnson. “It takes mor’n a fool to beat Hanna,” muttered Sims. “If you beat Hanna nobody can say any damned fool can beat Sims. You beat me. I want you to beat Hanna.” With Sims’ two votes Johnson did beat Hanna with but a single vote to spare.

Hanna denounced Johnson’s plan to give “two rides” for a single fare. The service would cost five cents. The line would run at a loss. As it turned out the new line proved Johnson’s most prosperous venture.

But Hanna could beat Johnson too. These two men rose to riches, electrified their lines, built them into powerful properties. Consolidation followed consolidation until two companies dominated the city—the Big Consolidated (Johnson’s line) and the Little Consolidated (Hanna’s line). Finally the two lines merged and Johnson sold out. Hanna hated Johnson. He hated everything the man stood for. He would grow red in the face and pound his stick as he denounced him as a radical, a Socialist, a destroyer of society.

As Mayor, Johnson attempted to run trolleys for three cents a ride. To Hanna this was hardly less than treason. Johnson forced the council to grant the necessary franchises to the city. Hanna promptly induced the attorney-general, Joseph Sheets, to bring an action declaring the city government of Cleveland unconstitutional. This was the same Joseph Sheets who later would dismiss the injunctions against the Standard Oil Company. The court sustained Hanna’s contention. City governments all over Ohio were thrown into confusion by the decision. The governor called a special session of the legislature to reconstruct municipal governments. Hanna went to Columbus to sponsor a bill to permit granting perpetual franchises to his own company. The legislature adopted the new city government code but Hanna’s perpetual franchise was a little too much even for that corporation-controlled body to swallow.

These battles raged for years. Cleveland belonged to its iron, oil, gas, electric, and streetcar interests, its banks and real-estate promoters, and Hanna became their recognized spokesman. They began to look to him to defend them. Thus led into politics by his railway company, he came to like it. He was a man of restless energy and loved combat and power. His own business was soundly organized and prosperous and he found he could take more and more time for his excursions into political strife. By the late ’eighties he was a familiar figure in Cleveland, with his round ruddy face, his long narrow beard streaming down over his chin, his portly body, his heavy square shoulders, his flat-topped bowler hat. His fellow citizens saw him driving along Euclid Avenue, sitting in his private box at his own theater, moving about the neighborhood of the Public Square, stopping to converse vigorously, often angrily, with acquaintances, pounding his stick on the pavement. Though only a local celebrity he was a figure of importance and power.

Hanna will always be remembered as the man who made McKinley President. Hanna’s ambition to be a President-maker had been formed before he became intimate with McKinley. He had, in fact, first come to know the latter when he was engaged, a dozen years before, in an effort to make John Sherman the Republican nominee for President. Hanna was named one of Ohio’s big four in 1884.

It was at the convention of 1884 that he first found himself in contact with McKinley and Foraker, who were also delegates-at large. Hanna supported Sherman, but Foraker and McKinley threw their strength to Blaine, who was nominated. Thereafter Hanna maintained friendly relations with both men but saw little of McKinley, then in Congress. In the next Republican convention Hanna took the lead as the campaign manager for old Senator John Sherman, who was thought to have a fighting chance for the presidency. The Ohio delegation was pledged to Sherman. McKinley was then a commanding figure in Congress; Foraker was the dashing Governor of Ohio. And in this convention Hanna formed his devoted friendship with McKinley and began his lifelong feud with Foraker.

McKinley’s name first came into notice as a presidential candidate in that 1888 convention. Hanna, convinced that Sherman’s star had set, decided to switch to McKinley because, as he told a friend, he “was going to stop riding the wrong horse.” His real friendship for McKinley came after he had settled on that gentleman as his next entry for the presidency.

These three men—Hanna, McKinley, Foraker—formed a striking group. Each was to rise as a presidential possibility. Each represented a wholly different type in American politics. If we add to the group William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, and Matthew Stanley Quay, we have a gallery of indigenous leaders which could be duplicated on a small scale in every state and village of the country. McKinley, the pious, respectable patriot, the cautious opportunist speaking the language of courage, of strength; Foraker, the strong, able, audacious, and unscrupulous demagogue; Roosevelt and Bryan, both high-minded idealists, one a confirmed chauvinist and jingo with an immense store of practical political skill, the other an uncompromising crusader for fixed causes; Hanna and Quay—bosses—Quay openly corrupt and deriving his power from his dominion over an unspeakably rotten state machine, Hanna getting his power from the stores of money which he could command from the combined forces of business organizations interested in public privileges of all sorts. He was the businessman turned politician, with very low standards of public principles, but standing resolutely by them.

Of these, the most important in Hanna’s career was McKinley. The Major, as he was known, was in 1888 just forty-five years old. He had already served six terms in Congress, where he had attained fame as a militant protectionist. When President, he said of Theodore Roosevelt that “he was always in such a state of mind.” This described a temper precisely the opposite of McKinley’s. The Major never tilted at abuses. Mark Hanna was not more satisfied with the world as he found it than McKinley, whose name is identified with no effort in any direction to enlarge or improve the condition of his fellow men.

He was a type peculiarly useful to stronger men in our boss- and business-ridden system. The busy, practical purveyors of privilege and collectors of graft who rule the machines must have well-favored men who can be thrust out in front to give a good appearance to their ranks. McKinley was peculiarly fitted for this role. He was a pious soul, eminently respectable, handsome, distinguished in appearance, an able speaker, and greatly admired for his domestic virtues. He staged himself elaborately and remained always in character. He was a man who looked learned and yet who possessed very limited information of history or economics or law. He was never a student or reader of books though he came to be looked upon as a model of wisdom. His range of ideas was, like Mark Hanna’s, limited. He took up the philosophy, the mood, the character of the generation in which he was born and held fast to it.

A kind of legend grew up around the sweetness and patience of his home life. His wife was an epileptic. As a result she was a whimpering, querulous creature who spent her life in the contemplation and nourishment of her own sufferings. McKinley was deeply devoted to her. He yielded to this complaining and difficult woman a romantic and chivalrous attention that made Mark Hanna exclaim, “McKinley is a saint.” Hanna, like Joe Cannon and other contemporaries, liked the society of men, enjoyed a rubber of whist and an evening of chat. He was a simple soul and easily mistook McKinley’s lack of fondness for these perfectly normal masculine enjoyments for a kind of sainthood.

McKinley had an easy, unruffled amiability that never permitted him to quarrel with anyone. In his very first meeting with Hanna—which Hanna incidentally never remembered—the Major as a young attorney was engaged to defend a group of miners who were tried on a charge of damaging one of the Hanna company mines during a strike. Mark Hanna represented the operators in that fight and was present at the trial. One of Hanna’s biographers refers feelingly to the pleasant impression that the attorney who defended the miners made upon the wealthy operators present by his kindly recognition of the fact that in prosecuting his clients they were merely doing their duty as they saw it. McKinley saved every acquaintance, good and bad, for a rainy day.

His critics accused him of weakness. He was certainly not a strong figure. He could yield and trim and change and backslap and smile with all manner of men on all sides of all questions. But when the issue reached that line where the career of the Major was at stake he could reveal sudden and unsuspected resources of iron.

He was far craftier than the forthright Hanna. He was a man of endless caution. He seldom committed his views to writing or his political thoughts to letters. He had a fondness, which his associates noticed, for messengers. When he did write, it was often for the purpose of putting himself on record, a precaution he did not fail to use with his most devoted friends. He had one faculty that he employed with great success—his ability to varnish over any sort of cause, however dubious, with pious platitudes. When Dewey took Manila, McKinley could cable him to report immediately which was the richest and most desirable of the islands and then turn to the nation with a ringing defense of annexation as “benevolent assimilation.”

Foraker was a very different man—strong in his own right, an able debater, a powerful figure on the hustings or in a convention. He ruled an effective machine. When he went to the Senate he became a loud, warlike, ready champion of every form of corporate activity until William Randolph Hearst drove him from public life by exposing his acceptance of money from the Standard Oil Company.

For many years these two—Hanna and Foraker—battled for supremacy in Ohio. At that 1888 convention already referred to, Hanna assumed the leadership of John Sherman’s drive for the nomination. Foraker was Governor, a rising figure, enormously ambitious, and with an eye on the presidency himself. One day before the convention assembled Foraker walked into Sherman headquarters and saw the ruddy-faced Hanna, now bereft of his whiskers, surrounded by Southern delegates. His fingers were filled with currency and he was handing it out freely to his Negro guests. “Far from home and short of cash,” as Foraker described them, these delegates were selling their tickets for the convention gallery seats to Hanna and throwing in their souls for good measure. Of course, Hanna did not want the tickets. As a matter of fact, he turned the batch over to an associate who had them in a trunk many years later.

Foraker, who understood the dramatic values of opportune indignation, pretended to be shocked at this wholesale direct cash bribery. He denounced it. Hanna defended it as necessary since other candidates were doing it.

Hanna’s candidate, Sherman, was decisively defeated. Harrison was named to oppose Grover Cleveland but the man who left that convention with the largest dividend was William McKinley.

The two men were thrown together intimately during the convention. Hanna was astonished at the shrewdness and sagacity of McKinley. His surprise was mixed with pleasure because McKinley’s talent was beautifully garnished with a show of high-minded sentiments. Hanna himself was a more or less artless creature. He was blunt, outspoken, direct, utterly without guile. He moved always by the shortest route to his objective. He rested upon an almost childlike faith in the right of his class—business—to have its way, to make its profit, and the bigger the profit the better for the country. Workmen were protégés who should be dealt with benevolently. Loyalty to friends, right or wrong; a profound respect for the power of money to achieve its ends, and a willingness to use it as well as all the other recognized implements of political warfare, made up the balance of his creed. Hanna was not always a cautious man. He could explode with wrath at inopportune moments. McKinley was the soul of caution. Moreover he resolved every action into one of high moral ingredients. If he refrained from doing anything because it was inexpedient he could give his omission the appearance of a personal sacrifice. Hanna came to be very fond of McKinley and this deepened soon after into a genuine affection for the rising congressman.

Hanna was sure now that John Sherman could never be named. He was also convinced that McKinley could have been named with a proper drive behind the effort. He had no notion of relinquishing his one ambition—to name a President—and he resolved to devote himself henceforth to bringing about the nomination of McKinley.

Harrison was elected by a narrow squeak, the popular majority going against him. And immediately the Cleveland coal and iron man went doggedly about pushing the interests of his new candidate. He went to Washington to promote McKinley’s race for Speaker. But Thomas B. Reed, a stronger man than the Major, could not be beaten. Reed named McKinley chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and thus his name was given to the ill-starred tariff measure that would bring defeat to his party, sweep him from Congress, but in the end force McKinley to the top as the logical candidate of the Republicans in 1896.

Framing the McKinley bill made one of the most disgraceful chapters in the history of national legislation. McKinley called in the various special interests to be favored and told them to write out their own schedules. Advice was asked of no one else. Even so orthodox a protectionist as Blaine drew back from the surrender. He warned his party in Congress. But there was no favor which Big Business could ask that seemed exorbitant. When the next election rolled around, the Republican collectors presented themselves for their checks. But the checks did no good. Hanna was amazed and dismayed at the blast which came back from the country. The people had a score to settle and at the ensuing Congressional elections the Republicans were swept out of office. McKinley himself met defeat partly because of a skillful gerrymander. But the country at large knew merely that he had been defeated. The effect upon his fortunes was most discouraging. His own spirits sank, but he soon learned that he had a manager who could not be turned back.

Hanna’s problem was very difficult. The clouds were gathering over the nation’s business. The government was grappling with fiscal difficulties beyond its strength. A hostile Congress offered to Harrison endless possibilities of trouble. There was no lack of woe in Ohio. Following Harrison’s election, Hanna set out to elect McKinley Governor of Ohio and to remove Foraker from McKinley’s path.

He took personal charge of the fight and, when the legislature met to select Sherman’s successor in the Senate, Hanna went to Columbus and spent his time, his money, his personal influence to defeat Foraker. He succeeded. The election of McKinley and the defeat of Foraker now made Hanna the most powerful political figure in Ohio. Moreover it was widely accepted that he had a genuine presidential candidate on his hands.

Thus by his bold management, by his frank recognition of McKinley’s predicament and his fearless acceptance of the difficult chance of defeat for his candidate in a year when the tide was running strongly against his party, Hanna completely removed all the untoward effects of McKinley’s last defeat. Moreover, by McKinley’s election as Governor in a Democratic year, he thrust the Major forward again as a formidable contender for the presidency.

In this fight Hanna collected good political dividends from his many years of liberal contributions to the war chests of the party. Not only the state and city party machines, but numerous individual candidates had made frequent drafts upon the rich banker’s open wallet. After the local campaign of 1897, Hanna dropped into Republican headquarters to find the committee sitting about in lugubrious gloom. When he was told that a deficit of $1250 caused all their sorrow, he laughed, wrote a check for the amount, and handed it over without being asked. McKinley himself was one of those politicians who was in occasional need of money and did not hesitate to borrow from Hanna. Hanna paid his personal campaign expenses in 1891. On one occasion he contributed $1200 to the campaign of a county treasurer, then collected a group of friends to sign the treasurer’s bond for a million, and, thereafter, got a large share of the county funds for his bank.

As the troubled contest of 1892 approached, Hanna perceived that McKinley’s moment had not yet arrived. President Harrison had the usual commanding call on a renomination. Moreover the drift was away from the Republicans. But Hanna had kept his man well to the front. Throughout the campaign, while Harrison was running for President in 1892, McKinley was running for President in 1896, managed by Mark Hanna. And as the waves closed over the head of the unpopular Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley rose up above the waters as the unquestioned leader in the race four years later.

Mark Hanna, now in collaboration with that peculiar series of events that were referred to as the fruit of Major McKinley’s destiny, went to work to nail down the prize. The Cleveland administration struck rock after rock—silver, Morgan’s bonds, the Wilson tariff bill, the income-tax fiasco, the railroad strikes and Cleveland’s suppression of them with Federal troops. The Democrats were doomed. McKinley was triumphantly elected Governor of Ohio. Hanna saw a cartoon one day in the Cleveland Leader depicting McKinley’s beaming countenance rising like the sun over the prostrate land and Uncle Sam pointing toward him as the Rising Sun of Prosperity. Hanna saw instantly the value of that idea. He immediately dubbed McKinley the “Advance Agent of Prosperity.” Thus Hanna managed to put a label on the Republican party that it was to wear successfully until it peeled off in the damp of the deluge under Hoover. The theory that prosperity is inextricably tied up with the domination of government by business was thus wondrously stamped upon the public mind. And this was one of the notions Hanna believed in with a consuming conviction.

It was in these years that Hanna moved into that position of power that brought him closer to the role of national political boss than any other man, before or since, has occupied without actually being President. So far as McKinley was concerned his strategy was to keep McKinley free of all entanglements and free from association with any issue save the good old Republican standby of the tariff. In a campaign noted for its single-mindedness, its sheer persistence, its ample treasury, and its freedom from errors, Hanna pushed forward the fortunes of his smiling, handsome, and crafty candidate until he was nominated and elected president of the United States.

But this drive was interrupted by one strange mischance in which it seemed as if all the friendly fairies had quit the entourage of the Major. In 1893 Hanna had been summoned to New York by the untoward effect of the panic on his own business. A wire came from Myron T. Herrick, Cleveland banker, announcing that a man named Robert L. Walker, a tin-can manufacturer of Youngstown, Ohio, was in business difficulties and that McKinley was caught on some $100,000 of his notes. Herrick and others were trying to raise sufficient funds to bail the Major out and needed aid from Hanna. Hanna hurried back to Cleveland only to find that the blow had fallen, that Walker had gone into bankruptcy, that McKinley, crushed by the news, had lost his nerve, was threatening to resign as Governor, withdraw from political life, go into bankruptcy, and devote the rest of his days to repaying his debts. A stranger fate never overtook a presidential candidate.

The whole story of this odd episode has apparently never been fully told. But enough has come to light to reveal the ease with which the Major all his life could accept the bounty of other men. McKinley in his youth had borrowed some $5000 from Walker to pay his way through his law studies. This small item McKinley never troubled himself to repay. When he became Governor, Walker, then in the tin-can business, got McKinley to endorse his notes. One day one of these notes made its way to Herrick’s bank. It produced some apprehension and Herrick went to the Governor, who with something less than candor explained that he owed Walker $5000. Herrick got that sum from a rich admirer of the Major and sent it to Walker. But the Walker notes with McKinley endorsements continued to appear in various banks. The sum totaled $130,000. Then Herrick notified Hanna. Before they could arrange the necessary funds Walker’s business was devoured by the depression. He was adjudged a bankrupt, and the news got out.

Hanna and Herrick then hurriedly collected the necessary $130,000 from a select list of Republicans to pay the Major’s way to solvency. Some gave, as John Hay’s biographer informs us, “because they admired McKinley, some because he had served them in Congress, some because they wanted to save the party from unedifying criticisms.” The subscribers to the ransom fund were Hanna and Herrick, Carnegie, Frick, Samuel Mather, and other big businessmen of Cleveland, John Hay, Philander C. Knox, H. H. Kohlsaat, and some others. McKinley’s biographers relate that he deeded all his and his wife’s property to three trustees, leaving to him only his business block in Canton in which he had an equity of $50,000.

Did McKinley ever repay these sums? His biographer and Mark Hanna’s are singularly silent on that point. McKinley himself had a habit of making up the record for himself and so, although throughout this distressing episode he remained under the shelter of Herrick’s home, there is extant a letter written by him to Herrick, recording his sentiments in grandiloquent terms. He described the transaction as the “collection of wildly scattered paper of his into a few hands.” He “insisted that this paper be bought dollar for dollar,” as if he were supplying the cash to his fiscal agents. This paper was to be held as an “obligation against me.” Then with an almost Pickwickian gesture he declared he would have to decline the payment of his debts by his friends on any other terms.

Myron T. Herrick’s biographer, a peculiarly inaccurate chronicler, declares that McKinley thereafter sent money which he saved from his salary. Herrick never appears to have disbursed any of it. Instead he invested it, and McKinley referred to “these little investments” in a letter to Herrick a few months before his death. After McKinley’s death Herrick turned these investments over to the President’s widow.

As the Republican convention assembled at St. Louis late in June, 1896, the nation faced a new war of the sections, this time between the West and the East, that took a very old form. Always in periods of depression the value of money rises and always the debtor class clamors for currency inflation in some form. Then it was expressed in the demand for the remonetization of silver. Hanna’s strategy was designed to suppress the silver issue as McKinley’s history on that point was bad. He had been a bimetallist. He had voted to override Hayes’ veto of the Bland-Allison Silver Act and he had voted for the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. But now he sealed his lips on the silver issue.

Many men supposed him to be still an ardent bimetallist. The California delegation came to the convention instructed for McKinley and Free Silver. The West was for bimetallism. But the powerful East, which was Republican, and which would have to supply the sinews of war, was for gold. The syndicate that had bailed McKinley out of bankruptcy, as Tom Reed sneeringly described it, would never stand for a silver platform. Hence at St. Louis the position on the money question of almost every man present was known save that of McKinley, the aspirant for leadership. Newspapermen prodded Hanna to know where McKinley stood. Hanna replied that the convention, not the candidate, made the platform, ignoring the apparently unimportant fact that the candidate would have to stand on it. Old Senator Teller of Colorado headed a militant silver group unalterably opposed to gold. Henry Cabot Lodge and Tom Reed led the Eastern host equally set against silver. Hanna wanted the votes of all groups. He brought to St. Louis a money plank artfully phrased to satisfy the gold people and fool the silver wing. But it encountered in the Resolutions Committee Hanna’s old foe, Joseph B. Foraker, who as chairman of the Committee forced through an unequivocal gold plank.

Even after his nomination McKinley refused to take the money plank seriously. “I am a tariff man standing on a tariff platform,” he insisted. “This money matter is too prominent. In thirty days you won’t hear anything about it.” “In thirty days,” replied his friend, Judge William R. Day, “you won’t hear of anything else.” At first McKinley tried to dodge the money question. He fell back upon obscure phrases like “sound money” and “an honest dollar.” But Bryan had been named by the Democrats and had the country aflame with his holy war for silver. And so in the end McKinley, the bimetallist, was forced to unload his old faith and come out openly for the gold standard. This was characteristic of McKinley. No man could slip from under an issue more smoothly than he. He did no bleeding for unpopular causes. He chose with discrimination causes which called for no blood.

McKinley, of course, was nominated by an overwhelming majority. His nomination, indeed, was a foregone conclusion when the, convention assembled—had been, in fact, ever since the Illinois convention in April which instructed for him. And when the convention adjourned his election seemed equally secure.

It is the custom of conservative historians to describe the following of Bryan—the silver Democrats and their Populist allies—as a horde of maddened, class-crazed, violent agitators threatening the foundations of constitutional government. As a matter of fact, nothing could exceed the violence of the Eastern supporters of McKinley. They exhausted the resources of denunciation and abuse and stormed against Bryan and his “mob of repudiators,” as the sober New York Evening Post called them, with incredible fury.

Theodore Roosevelt, who really knew no more about the money question than any cornfield soapbox orator in the West, flayed what he loved to call the “Popocrats” who would bring the country to social revolution. These dangerous nihilists demanded a graduated income tax, postal savings banks, recognition of Cuban independence, home rule in the territories and the District of Columbia, ballot reform, popular election of Senators and the President, the initiative and referendum, a program of public works during periods of depression, government ownership of railroads and telegraphs, and bimetallism. Most of these things have since been introduced into our system, and Roosevelt himself would one day out-Popocrat the Popocrats by damning with the same violence those who opposed these things.

The fashionable preachers of New York broke into full cry against the enemies of the Lord. Dr. Robert S. McArthur of Calvary Baptist Church and the celebrated Dr. Parkhurst poured out the vials of their wrath upon Bryan, and Dr. Courtland Meyer, in Henry Ward Beecher’s old church, dramatically proclaimed: “I love the bloodstained banner of the cross and it is in danger.” The New York Tribune bitterly assailed Bryan as the rival “of Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr and Jefferson Davis in deliberate wickedness and treason to the republic.” The Evening Post saw in the proceedings of the Chicago convention that named Bryan a duplication of the opening scenes of the French Revolution. The abuse and billingsgate heaped on Bryan was so savage that Dr. Albert Shaw, the conservative editor of the Review of Reviews, took his friends to task: “The editors, university professors, and Eastern bankers who are calling all the leaders of the West and South anarchists and demagogues are making the situation more difficult by their mischievous folly.” When the contest was over, the Tribune rejoiced in the victory which had come because “God is God and right is right,” while Cornelius Bliss and Jacob Schiff and Isaac Seligman and other great bankers sat around the festive board with the triumphant leader of the victorious gold hosts and “thanked God for Mark Hanna.”

The fury of the other side was loosed chiefly against Hanna. Davenport’s savage cartoon furnished an anthropomorphic devil upon which the hatred of the masses could vent itself. Those famous caricatures, representing Hanna leading McKinley, a diminutive Napoleon, crushing workers, bowling over women and children, piling up money bags, and fraternizing with the trusts, cut deeply into Mark Hanna’s hide. “These hurt,” he complained bitterly to Senator Dolliver.

There was a deep-rooted reason for these violent emotions. A whole new era, a powerful congeries of new interests, the whole developing adventure of corporate capitalism or, as it has come to be a little obscurely called, finance capitalism, was at the crossroads. For a number of years these new interests under all sorts of industrial “captains” and commercial “kings” had been accumulating strength, creating and improving the new instruments of wealth getting, bowling ahead with the assistance of growing public approval—a kind of hesitant but growing admiration of their prowess—and the corrupt collaboration of lawmakers and public officials.

But for several years—particularly since 1893—the nation had been plunging into a deep and stubborn depression. The clamor of the farmers, the Western small businessmen, the workingmen in the Western cities for inflation in the form of free silver threatened the investments of the great bankers and their clients in the East. The rising anger at men like Rockefeller, Morgan, Gates, Harriman, and all the railroad buccaneers, the packers, the trust magnates reached a critical energy and fervor in the fiery evangel of Bryan and threatened the stability and security of that whole great corporate machine that they had fashioned for the production and concentration of wealth. The election of 1896 was a sort of crucial battleground that might well determine the course American development would take in the coming years. Certainly the highly excited partisans of the period felt it to be so. And this fanned their partisanship into the flames that made that whole campaign one of the most heated in American political history. At this particular moment Mark Hanna became the field marshal of the hosts of property in one of the great decisive battles of our own history.

He segregated and organized big business on the side of the political philosophy that was essential to its existence and he made it pay the bills for the warfare he was waging.

Hanna’s name will always be associated with the perfection of that important art popularly known as “frying the fat,” which is only a picturesque way of describing the process of rendering into campaign cash some of the suet which rich men are enabled to accumulate through political favors. It was not at all a new business. As business grew bigger and fatter and more at the mercy of government, politicians soon learned how to make the prosperous ones pay for immunity. William E. Chandler had learned how to draw generous sums from men like Roach and Gould. Carter, who managed Harrison’s campaign, got $400,000 from the shipbuilder, George Cramp. In the preceding struggle between Blaine and Cleveland, Blaine’s spectacular campaign was brought to an end with that famous Royal Feast of Belshazzar when Gould and Sage, Astor, Flagler, Mills, Carnegie, and some two hundred “money kings” sat down to terrapin, duck, and champagne at what the New York World called the “boodle banquet.” Stephen B. Elkins needed more money for the last big Blaine effort and the money kings were brought together for the frying.

All this was just a loose way of doing what Hanna would do in an orderly manner and on a large scale in 1896. He told corporation executives bluntly that they got plenty of service from the Republican party and ought not to hesitate to pay for it. He levied an outright assessment on every bank. Later he denied a charge in the Senate by Senator Teller that he had done this. But his official biographer concedes that the assessment was one quarter of one per cent. The Standard Oil gave $250,000. Other corporations contributed in proportion. How much he actually collected and spent no one can say. His biographer admits it was $3,500,000 while Senator Foraker, who had opportunity to know, says it was not less than $7,000,000.

The dollar marks on Hanna’s suit, put there by the cartoonist Davenport, were intended to represent not Mark Hanna’s own personal creed, but the policy of using the money of corporate magnates to buy whatever they wanted in public life. And Hanna understood perfectly what the money was paid for. He hammered at contributors. “I know you people will do the fair thing,” he wrote to Archbold, paymaster of Standard Oil, “and I want the state committee to get a liberal subscription from you this time. . . . This whole fight is against the corporations and me as their champion.” When Archbold wanted service he called on Hanna and wrote him “to enlist your aid” to defeat two antitrust bills in the Ohio legislature. He wrote again to urge Hanna to be active to defeat Smith W. Bennett for attorney-general of Ohio because he assisted Frank Monnett in prosecuting Standard Oil.

There is a popular notion that the Civil War wrecked the Democratic party; that after that vast upheaval the population of the country became Republican as it had been Democratic before. This of course is not true. It was Mark Hanna and the full dinner pail and the legend of prosperity that wrecked the Democratic party.

Obviously Lincoln’s second election, in the midst of the war, and Grant’s two elections, with Federal troops in possession of all the Democratic states, cover a period of abnormal conditions in which, of course, the Democratic party ceased to function. But if we examine the elections from 1876—following the return of the wayward sisters—down to 1892, the result is a little surprising. In that time there were five presidential elections and in four out of five of them the Democrats obtained the undisputed popular majorities. Tilden and Cleveland three times obtained more votes than their Republican opponents. It must also be obvious now that they also obtained majorities in the Electoral College in three out of the five elections, since Hayes was declared elected only by giving him the votes of Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina which no man in his senses now believes represented the political sentiment of those states.

In that same period ten Congressional elections were held and the Democrats enjoyed majorities in six out of the ten. It was not until the election of 1896 and the strange combination of circumstances that followed, which established the Republicans as the guardians and conservators of prosperity, that Democratic defeat became almost a habit with the voters. Since then, out of nine presidential elections until 1932, Republican candidates have been victorious in seven and they controlled the House in thirteen out of twenty Congressional elections. It took the economic cataclysm of 1932 to shake them from power.

The full dinner pail did what a civil war could not do. Hanna promised prosperity if McKinley was elected. McKinley was elected. Prosperity came. The overwhelming demonstration was too much for a people who had been hungry too long. Of course, Hanna and McKinley and their tariff promises and their reluctant gold dosage had no more to do with the revival of business than the incantations of a ring of witch doctors have to do with the recovery of a tubercular savage.

The depression had been forming for years. It came when the orgy of reckless railroad building and industrial expansion and wild speculation, all on borrowed money, ended because no more money could be borrowed. Construction of all sorts ceased completely, as it has today. Conquest of the depression was possible only by reviving construction—short, of course, of an accident. No one seemed to know this save the despised Populists who clamored for a program of public works.

Just before the election the Indian wheat crop failed. This made an unexpected market for our own wheat which promptly went up to ninety-five cents and beyond all doubt settled the election of McKinley. But after the election, prosperity continued to lurk stubbornly around its corner. Stocks rose with the great news of Republican victory but fell back again just as they did in 1933. Seven hundred manufacturing establishments lit their fires but put them out again in thirty days. Failures increased and bank clearings were lower in the first seven months after the election than in the seven months before.

Hanna was deeply troubled. He did not know that the cure had already really set in from wholly uncontrolled sources. First, vast new supplies of gold were uncovered and the new cyanide process greatly increased the yield from the old mines. In 1904 Leroy Beaulieu pointed out that half the gold then in the world’s central banks and treasuries had been accumulated since 1890. But even more important, France was swept by a drought, which cut her wheat yield by 93 million bushels. The Russian crop was damaged by rains, reducing it by 80 million bushels, while storms in the Danube Valley destroyed over 127 million bushels of its wheat. Moreover the good prices of wheat in the preceding fall had encouraged American farmers to plant more, so that now, with a tremendous shortage of grain in Europe, our farmers had an increased supply. Wheat went to a dollar on the Chicago Board of Trade. Our ships hurried over the seas laden with grain and returned with gold. As a result the gold reserve which was $44,000,000 in 1896 was swelled to $245,000,000 in 1898. The Gold Standard Act was not passed until 1899. It required a gold reserve of $150,000,000 and this would not have been possible without these two accidental circumstances.

With this powerful stimulus business started up. We rushed forward again into an era of building electric streetcar lines, electric-light plants, and skyscrapers; of remaking our run-down railroads and creating new industries. Capital construction with borrowed money began again. Income expanded. Prosperity returned. And all this without the Grand Old Party moving its fingers, though it did move its jaws lustily to proclaim the magic.

There was a logical and poetic fitness in Mark Hanna’s rise to leadership at this moment. He embodied the strength and the weakness of the people—their perfect attachment to getting along, their tolerance of the current art of getting along, their practical organizing power, their admiration of the adventurers they were pleased to look upon as Titans and whom they called, half affectionately, Captains and Kings of Industry.

Changes were in progress very deep under the surface. Our economic life had been undergoing a revolution. But Hanna himself understood little of its meaning. He believed an employer ought to be generous to his employees. Hanna always denounced those employers who refused to treat with their workers. His own record was above reproach on that score. In 1894 when Cleveland sent soldiers to Chicago to quell the Pullman strikers, Hanna, standing in the Union Club in Cleveland, created an uproar by denouncing Pullman. “Goddamn the man who won’t deal with his men,” he thundered, until Myron Herrick led him out. That there might be a flaw hidden away somewhere in the system itself never occurred to him.

Of course, this new economic order had to have a philosophy. And accordingly a confusion of apologists came forward. Americans who knew little of Nietzsche and Zarathustra began to hear much of the superman. Privately they would concede that you could not hold these great doers to the same ethical limitations that applied to corner grocers. Others who were reading for the first time the magazine articles about Darwin and Huxley, which were having a great popular vogue, explained that we were merely passing through a slightly accelerated phase of the evolutionary process, in which those strong men were hurrying a little the process of survival. The growing economics departments of the older colleges were, for the most part, provided with men like John Bates Clark at Yale who laid on lustily at the labor movement, and Professor J. Laurence Laughlin of Harvard and later Chicago University who could be depended on to explain all current phenomena in satisfactory terms, to say nothing of hirelings like Professor George Gunton who wrote monthly diatribes against the enemies of the trusts and pocketed the checks of Mr. John D. Archbold. Of course, pulpits everywhere, taking their cues from the Reverend DeWitt Talmage and their benefactions from their rich communicants, managed to compose the hostile properties of Nietzsche, Darwin, Mammon, and Jesus into a new and comforting theological goulash.

In such a society, agitated at the time by a profound depression, Mark Hanna assumed the direction of the political machine that would support and protect the ruling elements while they consolidated their control of the economic machine. He organized Big Business as a cohesive political entity.

As McKinley’s inauguration approached, Hanna planned to take a house in Washington and prepared to assume the role of general superintendent of that machine. He had cherished, not an ambition, but a kind of remote wish for a place in the Senate. Hanna, despite his arrogance, knew his limitations and had a kind of blunt modesty and he never dreamed this wish could be fulfilled. Now, however, he was being dined and feted and thrust forward and called on for speeches. He found himself rubbing elbows with many so-called statesmen and became aware that he was not so far behind them. Thus the notion was born.

There was no vacancy from Ohio. Sherman had two years to serve. Foraker had just been elected. However, Hanna and McKinley talked it over and concerted a plan. McKinley would appoint John Sherman Secretary of State. The Governor of Ohio could then name Hanna to the Senate vacancy. But Bushnell, the Governor, hated Hanna. Hanna went to his old enemy, Foraker, and asked him to urge Bushnell to appoint him. The idea of Hanna in the Senate amazed Foraker. It seemed incongruous. Foraker regarded Hanna as inarticulate and ignorant. Moreover, Foraker did not like the appointment of Sherman as Secretary of State. He had observed at the last Zanesville convention, when Sherman presided, that the old Senator’s memory was seriously impaired. He was an aged man incapable of coping with the now greatly enlarged duties of the State Department. But Hanna’s mind was made up. Foraker went to McKinley and sought to dissuade him. McKinley backed Hanna. Foraker brought the proposal to Bushnell, who drew away from it. But, after all, McKinley was President. He was able to apply the necessary pressure.

In the end Bushnell had to yield—a triumph, thought Foraker, of impudence and gall. Sherman was named Secretary of State. But Bushnell kept Hanna on the griddle and did not hand the Senate commission to him until inauguration day, only a few moments before the Senate convened. As for Sherman, his infirmities soon asserted themselves. The old man saw very soon that the President was passing him over, summoning to the White House the assistant secretary, Judge William Day. When war with Spain was declared he resigned and retired to nurse his hatred of both McKinley and Hanna for having pushed him out of both Senate and Cabinet.

The Senate into which Hanna moved was now in process of being recast. There were plenty of the old school there—notably Senator George Hoar of Massachusetts and Senator Morgan of Alabama. But the wealthy utility and railroad men and their counsel had begun to make their appearance and before long Mark Hanna found himself the dominant figure in a ring of lawgivers he could thoroughly understand. There were Chauncey Depew, president of the New York Central, and Tom Platt from New York; Matt Quay and Boies Penrose, two of the most frankly corrupt politicians ever to sit in that body; Stephen B. Elkins, multimillionaire utility magnate, and Scott of West Virginia; Philander C. Knox, Carnegie’s attorney, and Nelson W. Aldrich, another rich utility owner; Keane of New Jersey, holder of many gas millions. Of course it was never necessary to hand out money to these men, as it was to chaps like Foraker and Bailey, to get things done for big business. They were big business and they formed under Hanna’s leadership the advance guard of that wave of big-business leaders who would swarm over the government, seize complete dominion of its machinery, and end by plunging it into one of the most crushing depressions in history.

Hanna had his seat by appointment. He had now to make it good by election. He promptly announced his candidacy and, at sixty years of age, with fear and trembling for the first time in his life, had to go out upon the hustings to support his claim. He quickly made good as an able, effective, rough-and-tumble political speaker, making two-hour speeches without any notes, flinging back sharp replies to the crowds, laying on his opponents with ungloved hands. He succeeded in getting a safe Republican majority elected to the Ohio legislature and when that body assembled he had no opponent. But a hostile coalition soon appeared. The Democrats agreed to support a Republican to defeat Hanna. The Republican insurgents and Democrats settled on Mayor McKisson of Cleveland and a riotous contest soon developed.

Wild excitement reigned in Columbus. The opposing factions provided bodyguards to protect weak-kneed followers from seizure. One Hanna legislator was kidnaped and locked in McKisson headquarters, until Hanna men recaptured him and spirited him back to their own camp where he was put under lock and key. When the final decisive vote was due Hanna had a majority of one. One backslider could upset everything. His supporters were marched to the legislature under guard. Armed men patrolled every entrance. Then came the bombshell. J. C. Otis, a silver Republican, rose in the House and charged that a man named Shayne, in the presence of Otis’ counsel, had offered him a bribe of $1750 if he would vote for Hanna and Otis electrified the House by producing the $1750. This produced a sensation but did not prevent Hanna’s election. The House named a committee to investigate. Its members, save one, were unfriendly to Hanna. But that lofty gentleman refused to offer any testimony.

The committee heard a number of witnesses, reported their findings, and the House voted to send the testimony and report to the United States Senate with a demand for an investigation. The Senate received the demand, sent it to a committee, and that body, over a minority protest, reported unfavorably on an investigation. Both majority and minority conceded that Otis’ charge seemed to be sustained. But the majority insisted this did not cloud Hanna’s title. The testimony submitted to the Senate is still extant and no fair minded man can read it without admitting it establishes at least a prima-facie case justifying further inquiry. Hanna’s contention that Shayne, a New York furrier, unknown to his supporters, traveled all the way to Columbus without any interest in the election save that of a mere busybody and bought a vote for Hanna with $1750 in cash is, to say the least, a little thin. Hanna and his friends blocked an investigation and his name must continue to rest under the odium of that act.

Hanna’s career as Senator lasted just seven years. The man was undoubtedly ill at ease at first. He never opened his mouth for the first two years. Thereafter his contributions to the debates of the Senate were limited to five occasions and four subjects, all of the type that would readily suggest themselves to the mind. He sought to force the Navy Department to adopt the Guthman torpedo, he defended the steelmakers in their extortionate price for armor plate, he led the battle for the shipping subsidies and also led the fight for the Panama Canal route against the Nicaraguan route. He was successful in his canal fight because he was able to unite with the forceful and dynamic Roosevelt. But in none of these did he exhibit more than the most ordinary capacities as a debater.

At first, of course, the problems of patronage consumed his time. Office seekers swarmed to his offices and his home so that, it was said, he took refuge in his dentist’s chair. He was the most observed man in Washington. Visitors to the Senate gallery invariably asked to have Hanna pointed out to them first. His mail was the heaviest of any man in Washington outside the President’s and he required a secretariat to handle it.

The time came, however, when he could devote more attention to his senatorial duties, which he always took with great seriousness. He attended sessions faithfully and could be seen with his large dark eyes fastened intently upon any Senator who addressed the Senate. He took almost no public part in the discussions of the Spanish war problems. Indeed for two years he followed faithfully the course of perfect regularity in his votes.

His first important entry into the debates occurred in 1899 when an attempt was made to resist the exactions of the steelmakers on armor plate. The Senate proposed to limit the price to $445 a ton and if that price were not met it proposed to instruct the Secretary of the Navy to build the government’s own armor-plate factory. The steelmakers had been charging $545 a ton. With this attack on one of the greatest trusts, Elkins of West Virginia and Hanna broke their silence in the Senate and leaped to the defense. The going got hard for Hanna. When he found himself confronted by the formidable Senator Ben Tillman of South Carolina he begged for mercy. “I appeal to the Senator—I am a tyro here—to give me a chance.” He had then sat in the Senate for three years. Hanna declared that $445 a ton was a low price. The Illinois Steel Company had offered to furnish plate for $240 a ton. Hanna called that a bluff. Former Secretary of the Navy Herbert declared it could be made for $192. “I think I know as much about it as Secretary Herbert,” Hanna replied.

He first assumed leadership in the ill-starred ship-subsidy bill, that strange measure which, as the stanch Republican editor, Dr. Albert Shaw, observed, seemed to have a most mysterious origin. The driving power behind this measure, as it came out later, when the Archbold letters were printed, was the Standard Oil crowd, and chiefly Henry H. Rogers, whose company would be one of its chief beneficiaries. Chauncey Depew wrote an elaborate speech for the bill and sent it to Archbold for approval before its delivery. Hanna took the lead and made a vigorous fight for it at two sessions. The Democrats talked it to death the first time. The second time Hanna forced it to a favorable vote. But such stalwart Republicans as Spooner, Allison, Dolliver, and Proctor voted against it.

The time came, however, after McKinley’s assassination, when Hanna became one of the most active members of the Senate. His activity consisted, however, chiefly in the influence he exercised over that body, through his political power rather than because of his senatorial talents. He won his most noteworthy success in the passage of the Panama Canal bill. Hanna always favored the isthmian canal. So did McKinley. But McKinley was won from the Nicaraguan route by the arguments of William Nelson Cromwell, the American lawyer lobbyist for the French company at Panama. Hanna’s two speeches for the ship-subsidy bills revealed no grasp of that subject. They were quite unimportant efforts. His speech for the Panama Canal, however, exhibited him at the highest mark he could reach. It was a good, clear, and able presentation of a subject which he had really studied, perhaps the first one in his life.

The assassination of William McKinley in 1901 suddenly wrenched from Hanna’s grasp the principal lever with which he controlled the powerful Republican machine. The “madman” he feared most was thrust into the White House. Yet in the midst of the McKinley funeral arrangements, Hanna went to the house in Buffalo where the new President was sworn in and pledged his support. But he frankly made it clear that this did not involve standing behind Roosevelt for renomination. Until the end he stood squarely on that pledge. Roosevelt consulted him on every important point of policy and Hanna was a frequent visitor at the White House.

Curiously, Hanna’s power in the Senate did not diminish. His prestige with the country, indeed, seemed to reach its highest point during these years. But all the same the great Boss was now in process of disintegration. He was still the foremost figure on the Hill. His mail continued to be greater than that of all the other Senators put together. To see visitors he did not use the marble lobby where other Senators talked to their constituents. He used the room of the Vice-President. If he wished to see a Cabinet officer he sent for him. He called on no one but the President. He was still chairman of the Republican National Committee. He still held the pursestrings of the party. He was still the Big Boss.

Hanna always indignantly denied he was a boss. He hated the word. He resented being bracketed with Quay and Platt and Croker and Cox and Abe Ruef and those other immortal rascals of the day. He was indeed much unlike these men. They were a sorry lot, excrescences thrown off by the blood diseases of the people, and Quay was the worst. If Roosevelt could be described as “pure act,” Quay might be described as “pure corruption.” Platt was different. He was the complete feline—not at all lacking in the essential virtue of dishonesty but veneering it, as Quay did not, with a thin coat of urbanity and piety. He wrote a book of hymns. He was “pure craft.” Dick Croker, on the other hand, was pure force—a plug-hatted ruffian, beating down rivals with the sheer power of his blackguard spirit as he had once done with his fists. Hanna, with less education than all these men save Croker, was, however, a more civilized being. He paid out his money and never took any. He represented an idea—a bad idea—but one which a well-fed minister of the Lord could openly defend in his carved-wood pulpit. But all the same it was an evil thing destined to curse this rich land with poverty and chaos. He stood for the unrestrained sway of the acquisitive man, the power of money emancipated from ethical and social law, to buy men and to rule them.

But at this moment Mark Hanna, for the first time in his life, faced a situation he did not know how to deal with. He faced a man who was as audacious, as direct as himself and swifter in action. The weapon Hanna understood best was the club; his strategy was the frontal attack. His ammunition was cash. These things he could not use now and he knew no other way.

Like all successful men, good luck had played heavily on his side. He had hammered away for twelve years at making a President. He continued hammering until the day came when the cards fell his way, with the Democrats in power with a ravaging depression on their hands. That party was hopelessly divided, and Hanna had the perfect candidate in his possession. He promised prosperity and prosperity came. That the causes were different didn’t matter. He had unlimited funds to use against a bankrupt opposition.

But now the tide moved not with but against him. He was at sea. And he was sick. And out there across his path stood a young antagonist, aflame with energy and ambition, who also understood the frontal attack, who knew precisely what he wanted, and who did not hang back from striking at the critical moment at the puzzled and vacillating Hanna. Such a blow he struck in 1903 when the Republican convention met in Ohio.

The rise of Hanna as a presidential possibility came first, feebly, after McKinley’s second election and then more actively after his assassination. Newspapers referred to it continually. Important business groups talked about it. He himself said nothing save an occasional assurance to friends that he did not wish the nomination.

As the year 1903 wore on, the drive to nominate Hanna gathered force. It was engineered almost wholly by a group of powerful industrialists and financiers from Wall Street. They organized a committee and raised $100,000, with a promise of $250,000 for the campaign. They felt sure of New York, of Ohio, and of the colored brethren in the South. Quay stood aloof. John D. Archbold of the Standard Oil Company tried to bring Quay into the fold. But the shrewd Pennsylvania boss remembered how Hanna had run out on him when his seat in the Senate was threatened. There is no doubt that Wall Street determined to defeat Roosevelt. But Hanna refused to give his consent. Colonel Oliver H. Payne, of Standard Oil, went to Cleveland in the fall to urge Hanna to come out for the nomination. But he refused to do so. He wrote Scott that he would refuse to say anything more about it.

There is no doubt that Hanna was at sea. He of course would have been willing to be pressed into the White House. But he had no wish to be defeated for the nomination by Roosevelt. What he wanted most at the moment was washing clean his name. He chaffed under the stain of his first election to the Senate. He wanted re-election by a decisive majority. He had to run for the Senate that year. He had to meet again his ancient enemy, Tom Johnson. Johnson was a candidate for governor. The Democrats had a highly respectable candidate for the Senate. Johnson swept over Ohio with a big circus tent, denouncing Hanna as the agent of Big Business and demanding the single tax, free trade, war on the trusts. Hanna followed him, with Myron T. Herrick running for governor and Warren G. Harding for lieutenant governor—the Three-H Ticket. Johnson’s attacks lashed Hanna, despite his failing strength, to apoplectic spasms of retaliation. He had his own tent, his own brass band. He called Johnson a carpetbagger, a faker, an anarchist, a blatherskite, and—worst of all—a Socialist. But Hanna won and got his re-election to the Senate by an enormous majority.

But he knew the weary engine was running down. After the Ohio campaign he found himself exhausted. His wife, his doctor, his friends all urged him to rest. But rest was impossible to Mark Hanna. His life was in pressing along. And he continued to press along until the worn and tired body fell under the pressure. He fell ill in December, fought against the growing weakness, got up several times and resumed his duties. But in the end an enemy appeared he could no longer ignore, typhoid. And while the papers continued to debate whether he would be a candidate, he lay dying in the Arlington Hotel. The end came February 15, 1904. Thus Roosevelt, whose first term was made possible by the death of McKinley, found his road cleared for a second term by the death of Hanna. After Hanna no leader remained to oppose him.

It is a popular fallacy that Hanna grew as he met new and wider horizons in public life. This is not so. He stood on labor precisely where he stood as a young employer. On other subjects he never altered his views. In the last half-dozen years he remained the same uncompromising tory he had been in the beginning. He had nothing but praise for the scoundrels who poisoned the army in the Spanish war. He stoutly denied there was a single trust in the United States. He went to Ohio in his last years to wring from the legislature perpetual franchises for his utility companies. He wrote and received the famous Archbold letters. In the last months of his life he stood by the notorious Rathbone and Perry Heath, who had been thrown out of the Post Office Department for the frauds unearthed by Bristow.

Hanna, the iron man, justified the extortionate armor-plate prices of the steel trust. Hanna, the shipbuilder, supported shipping subsidies. In the last days as in the first he was the symbol of the power of money to buy its way wherever it wished to go. The new rulers of our great industrial empire felt that their privileges were threatened, not by Socialists, but by what they called the populist element in politics. These men required for their adventures a collection of tools—banks, affiliates, corporation laws, securities, monopoly practices—all of which were impossible without the protection of the government. They felt that control of the government was essential. They feared Roosevelt and Bryan and they believed their security lay in making Hanna President. But they were mistaken. After the victory in 1896—the election of McKinley—they needed no more protection. Their system, their ethics, their ideals were hopelessly embedded in the system. The way was clear no matter who held office for the adventures that were to follow.