Mark Hanna
Marcus Alonzo Hanna was an American businessman and Republican politician who served as a United States Senator from Ohio as well as chairman of the Republican National Committee. A friend and political ally of President William McKinley, Hanna used his wealth and business skills to successfully manage McKinley's presidential campaigns in 1896 and in 1900.
Hanna was born in New Lisbon, Ohio, in 1837. His family moved to the growing city of Cleveland in his teenage years, where he attended high school with John D. Rockefeller, who became a lifelong friend. He was expelled from college, and entered the family mercantile business. He served briefly during the American Civil War and married Charlotte Rhodes. Her father, Daniel Rhodes, took Hanna into his business after the war. Hanna was soon a partner in the firm, which grew to have interests in many areas, especially coal and iron. He was a millionaire by his 40th birthday, and turned his attention to politics.
Despite Hanna's efforts on his behalf, Ohio Senator John Sherman failed to gain the Republican nomination for president in 1884 and 1888. With Sherman becoming too old to be considered a contender, Hanna worked to elect William McKinley. In 1895, Hanna left his business career to devote himself full-time to McKinley's campaign for president. Hanna paid all expenses to get McKinley the nomination the following year, although he was in any event the frontrunner. The Democrats nominated former Nebraska Congressman William Jennings Bryan, who ran on a bimetallism, or "Free Silver", platform. Hanna's fundraising broke records, and once initial public enthusiasm for Bryan and his program subsided, McKinley was comfortably elected.
Declining a Cabinet position, Hanna secured appointment as senator from Ohio after Sherman was made Secretary of State; he was re-elected by the Ohio General Assembly in 1898 and 1904. After McKinley's assassination in 1901, Hanna worked for the building of a canal in Panama, rather than elsewhere in Central America, as had previously been proposed. He died in 1904, and is remembered for his role in McKinley's election, thanks to savage cartoons by such illustrators as Homer Davenport, who lampooned him as McKinley's political master.
Early life and business career
Marcus Alonzo Hanna was born on September 24, 1837, in New Lisbon, Ohio, to Dr. Leonard and Samantha Hanna. Leonard's father, Benjamin Hanna, a Quaker of Scotch-Irish descent, was a wealthy store owner in New Lisbon. Dr. Hanna practiced in Columbiana County, where New Lisbon was located, until he suffered a spinal injury while riding. After the accident, he joined the family business, B., L., and T. Hanna, by then a major grocery and goods brokering firm. Samantha, née Converse, and her parents had journeyed west from Vermont when she was 11; she was of English, possibly Irish, and French Huguenot descent.Mark's uncle Kersey Hanna described Mark as a boy as "short, strong and rugged, with a full round figure". Young Mark attended the local public school, which conducted class in the basement of the Presbyterian church. He competed in the local boys' debating society, and on the question of whether the black man had more cause for complaint than the Indian, carried the day arguing for the blacks.
Members of the Hanna family invested in a canal project to connect New Lisbon, distant from waterways, to the Ohio River. The canal was a failure, and the family lost large sums of money. Most Hanna family members left New Lisbon in the early 1850s. Dr. Hanna went into partnership with his brother Robert, starting a grocery business in Cleveland, and relocated his family there in 1852. In Cleveland, Mark attended several public schools, including Cleveland Central High School, which he went to at the same time as John D. Rockefeller and was one of his classmates. After graduation in 1857, Hanna attended Western Reserve College, but was dismissed for distributing mock programs at a solemn ceremonial. Hanna served in various capacities in the family business, learning it from the bottom up.
Civil War service
By the start of the Civil War, he was a major participant in the business. Dr. Hanna had fallen ill with complications from his spinal injury, and Mark Hanna, even before his father's death, was made a partner.With an ill father and many business responsibilities, Mark Hanna could not be spared by his family to join the Union Army, hiring a substitute to enlist in his place. Instead, he became a member of the Perry Light Infantry, a regiment of National Guard troops consisting mostly of young Cleveland businessmen. In 1864, his regiment was briefly mustered into active service as the 150th Ohio Infantry and sent to be garrison troops at Fort Stevens, part of Washington, D.C.'s defenses. During the time the Perry Light Infantry was in service, it saw brief combat action as Confederate General Jubal Early feigned an attack on Washington. However, Hanna, who had been commissioned a second lieutenant, was absent during that time, having been sent to escort the body of a deceased soldier back to Ohio. The regiment was mustered out in August 1864. After the war, Hanna was elected a companion of the Ohio Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States—a military society of officers of the Union armed forces and their descendants.
Post war
Even before his service during the Civil War, Hanna had fallen in love with Charlotte Augusta Rhodes, whom he met in 1862, shortly after her return from a finishing school. Her father Daniel Rhodes was an ardent Democrat and was distantly related to Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for president in 1860. Rhodes disliked the fact that Hanna had supported the successful Republican candidate, former Illinois Congressman Abraham Lincoln. Daniel Rhodes eventually yielded, and Mark and Charlotte Augusta Hanna were married on September 27, 1864.The 1850s and 1860s were a time of great expansion for Cleveland, which grew from a small lakeside town to a major player in Great Lakes commerce and a rival to the southern Ohio city of Cincinnati. With peace restored in 1865, Hanna struck out on his own ventures. Foreseeing a demand for petroleum products, he built a refinery, and also invested his own money in the Lac La Belle, a swift Great Lakes steamer. The ship sank and the refinery burned, uninsured. The losses reduced Hanna to near-insolvency. According to Hanna biographer Herbert Croly, "he had gained little from the first nine years of his business life except experience." His father-in-law, appreciating Hanna's potential, took him into his own business in 1867 as a partner and soon retired. The firm, Rhodes and Company, dealt principally in coal and steel, but under Hanna expanded into many fields. The firm had close dealings with the railroads—especially the Pennsylvania Railroad, which carried much of its freight. Hanna later became director of two railroads, including one of the Pennsylvania's leased lines.
In the 1868 presidential election, Hanna supported the Republican, former Union General Ulysses S. Grant. The flood of inflationary greenback currency issued during the war made Rhodes and Company's dealings in the new confederation of Canada difficult; merchants would accept a dollar in paper money as the equivalent of 35 cents in gold. Hanna hoped that Grant, who was elected, would institute policies which would return full value to the currency. The firm built many vessels and also gained interests in a wide variety of firms, which in turn used the Rhodes steamers. Hanna also purchased Cleveland's opera house, allowing it to remain open at times when it could not pay its full rent.
During Grant's first four-year term, Hanna began to involve himself in politics. At first, his interest was purely local, supporting Republican candidates for municipal and Cuyahoga County offices. In 1869, he was elected to the Cleveland Board of Education, but as he was traveling a good deal for business at the time, was able to attend less than half the meetings. In 1873, disgusted by local scandals and the influence of party bosses, he and other Republicans briefly abandoned the party to elect a Democrat running for mayor of Cleveland on a reform agenda.
Aspiring kingmaker (1880–1888)
In 1880, Hanna added The Cleveland Herald newspaper to his business empire. This was resented by Edwin Cowles, who owned the Republican newspaper in Cleveland, The Cleveland Leader. For the next five years, until Hanna sold the newspaper, he was bitterly attacked by Cowles in his paper. According to Hanna biographer William T. Horner, the episode was the start of the negative image of Hanna in the press which would be further developed by the Hearst newspapers over a decade later. Cowles's paper attacked Hanna personally, dubbing him "Marcus Aurelius". Cowles's choice of nickname was dictated by the coincidence of name, without regard to that emperor's good reputation. The nickname remained with Hanna throughout the remainder of his career.The incumbent in 1880, President Rutherford Hayes, had no interest in seeking a second term; after 36 ballots, the Republicans nominated Ohio Representative James Garfield. The nominee had gone to the convention as manager of the campaign of his fellow Ohioan, Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman. Garfield had emerged as a candidate after delegates were impressed by his nomination speech of Sherman. Although Hanna did not attend the convention, he was very active in the fall campaign. The industrialist helped found a businessman's fundraising club to raise money for Garfield's personal expenses in the campaign. Garfield, who ran a front porch campaign, often had to entertain politicians and others who came to meet him at his home in Mentor. According to Charles Dick, who succeeded Hanna in the Senate after the latter's death in 1904, "Mr. Hanna had as much to do with the election of Mr. Garfield as any single individual in the country."
Hanna, according to his biographer Croly, was in charge of the arrangements for the campaign visit of former President Grant and New York Senator Roscoe Conkling to the state. Croly credits him with persuading the two men, who were Stalwarts hostile to Garfield's Half-Breed wing of the party, to visit Garfield in Mentor. Having Grant go to Mentor would be an important show of party unity—Grant had sought the presidency again in 1880, but his faction had failed to gain the nomination for him. However, later biographer Horner believes the tale dubious, suggesting that Grant made the decision unaided by Hanna. Garfield favored civil service reform, a position disliked by Hanna, who felt that public jobs should be used to reward campaign workers. Nevertheless, he strongly supported Garfield as a fellow Ohioan, and the Republican candidate defeated his fellow Civil War general Winfield Hancock by a narrow margin in the November election. Hanna did much fundraising work, roaming the state to persuade business owners to contribute to the Garfield campaign.
Hanna sought no position in the Garfield administration, although Horner states that his services to the campaign entitled him to a reward, and speculates that Hanna did not make any request of Garfield because of their political differences. Garfield's short-lived administration ended with his assassination after six months in office. Hanna was in charge of the committee which took charge of the late president's body when it was brought to Cleveland and saw to the funeral arrangements and interment at Lake View Cemetery—where Hanna himself was to be laid to rest over 20 years later.
In 1884, Hanna sought election as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in support of the presidential bid of Senator Sherman —President Chester A. Arthur, Garfield's successor, was seeking re-nomination, but was opposed by a number of other Republicans. Hanna supported Sherman as the candidate favored the gold standard and worked to solve the problems of business, and because he was from Ohio. The industrialist was successfully opposed by Cowles at the local convention but was elected a delegate-at-large from Ohio at the state convention. At the national convention, Hanna joined forces in support of Sherman with another delegate-at-large from Ohio, former Cincinnati judge Joseph B. Foraker, whose rise in state and national politics over the next 20 years would parallel Hanna's. The Ohio delegation proved bitterly divided between supporters of Sherman and those supporting Maine Senator James G. Blaine. Foraker gained national acclaim with his speech nominating Sherman, and Hanna worked for the senator's nomination, but Blaine won easily. With a non-Ohioan, the nominee, Hanna worked less energetically for the Republicans than he had in 1880. Blaine lost to the Democratic candidate, New York Governor Grover Cleveland.
During the first Cleveland administration, Hanna continued to run his businesses and prepared for another run by Sherman, whom he did not actually meet until 1885. Once he did, however, a warm relationship grew between the two men. President Cleveland selected Hanna as one of the Union Pacific Railroad's directors—part of the corporate board was then appointed by the government. The appointment was most likely at the recommendation of Senator Sherman. The industrialist's work for the railroad was highly praised by its president, Charles Francis Adams; Hanna's knowledge of the coal business led to him being appointed head of one of the board's committees with responsibility in that area. Hanna was a major campaign adviser and fundraiser for Foraker's successful runs for governor in 1885 and 1887.