Marcus A. Hanna

American politician

• Born: September 24, 1837
• Birthplace: New Lisbon, Ohio
• Died: February 15, 1904
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

Hanna was the close political friend of William McKinley, whom he helped to secure the presidency in 1896, and he served as an influential United States senator until his death.

Early Life

Marcus Alonzo Hanna was the son of Leonard Hanna, who had come from Scotch-Irish Quaker stock and was in the grocery business when he married Samantha Converse, a Vermont schoolteacher from Irish, English, and Huguenot stock. The younger Hanna attended public schools in New Lisbon and, after 1852, in Cleveland, where his family had moved. He enrolled in Western Reserve College but was suspended in 1857 for faking programs to a school function. Going to work for his father’s firm of Hanna, Garretson and Co., he took over his father’s position by the early years of the Civil War. He served briefly as a volunteer in that conflict in 1864 and later married Charlotte Augusta Rhodes, on September 27, 1864. She was the daughter of a Cleveland dealer in iron and coal.

By 1867, Hanna’s business ventures had failed, and he became a partner in his father-in-law’s firm of Rhodes and Company. From then on, Hanna was a success. In 1885, the coal and iron business was reorganized as M. A. Hanna and Company. He also had an interest in many aspects of the Cleveland economy. He owned an opera house, a local newspaper, several street railways, and a share of several banks. Hanna was a popular employer. “A man who won’t meet his men half-way is a God-damn fool,” he said in 1894, and he believed in high wages, the unity of capital and labor, and unions over strikes. By the time he was forty, Hanna was a capitalist of consequence in the Midwest, but it was his love for Republican politics in Ohio that made him a national figure.

Life’s Work

Hanna began as a backstage fund-raiser for Republican candidates at the end of the 1870’s; he played a large role in the campaign to elect James A. Garfield president in 1880. He first identified himself with the national ambitions of Senator John Sherman during the ensuing decade and worked closely with Governor Joseph B. Foraker on Sherman’s behalf. At the Republican National Convention in 1888, a dispute with Foraker over the Sherman candidacy ended the difficult alliance with the temperamental governor and started a feud that endured until 1904. Hanna then turned to the rising political fortunes of an Ohio congressman, William McKinley .

McKinley’s friendship with Hanna was the dominant force in the latter’s life for the next decade and a half. Cartoonists and critics after 1896 would depict a bloated, plutocratic Hanna as the manipulator of a pliable McKinley and thus create a popular image wholly divergent from the truth. In their political relationship, McKinley was the preeminent figure and Hanna was always the subordinate. The two men had met first during the 1870’s but did not establish a working partnership until the years 1888 to 1892. McKinley relied on the fund-raising ability and the organization skills that Hanna supplied in his races for governor of Ohio in 1891 and 1893. For his part, Hanna accorded McKinley an admiration that, in its early stages, verged on hero-worship.

McKinley’s political fortunes prospered during the 1890’s, a difficult time for the Democratic Party. After Benjamin Harrison failed to win reelection in 1892, the Ohio governor became a leading choice for the Republican nomination in 1896. Hanna helped McKinley through the embarrassing financial crisis in the Panic of 1893, when the governor became responsible for a friend’s bad debts. By early 1895, the industrialist gave up his formal connection with his business interests to push McKinley’s candidacy. Hanna set up a winter home in Georgia and began wooing southern Republicans who would be convention delegates in 1896.

The campaign to nominate McKinley went smoothly in the first half of 1896, and a first-ballot victory came when the Republicans assembled in St. Louis in mid-June. Hanna’s organizational abilities had helped McKinley gather the requisite delegate votes, but the candidate’s popularity and advocacy of the protective tariff during the depression made the task of his campaign manager an easy one. The two men also agreed on the currency plank of the Republican platform, which endorsed the gold standard in the face of the Democratic swing to the inflationary panacea of free silver.

Hanna and McKinley expected a relatively easy race until the Democrats selected the young and charismatic William Jennings Bryan, the champion of free silver, at their convention in July. As chairman of the Republican National Committee, Hanna supervised the raising of the party’s financial war chest during the late summer. The eastern business community, frightened of Bryan, contributed between three and four million dollars to the party’s coffers. Hanna then used these resources in what he called a “campaign of education.”

After setting up the major distribution point for campaign materials in Chicago, Hanna supervised the process that sent out more than 100 million documents espousing the virtues of the tariff and sound money; an equal number of posters depicted McKinley as “the advance agent of prosperity” and promised to workers “a full dinner pail” if McKinley were elected. By October, the diversified Republican appeal and the strength of McKinley’s campaign had overwhelmed the Democrats. Bryan’s whistle-stop campaign had not made his inflationary message popular. He was, said Hanna, “talking Silver all the time and that’s where we’ve got him.” Hanna’s strategy brought a resounding Republican victory in November, 1896.

As the new president formed his cabinet, he gave Hanna the opportunity to become postmaster general. Hanna’s real ambition, however, was to be senator from Ohio. When John Sherman resigned his seat to accept the State Department portfolio, the governor of Ohio appointed Hanna to fill out the remainder of his senatorial term. There was much talk at the time that a nearly senile Sherman had been kicked upstairs to make way for Hanna. In fact, Sherman wanted the place in the cabinet and accepted it voluntarily. Hanna was elected to a full term by the Ohio legislature early in 1898, after a close and bitter contest in which charges of bribery and other corrupt tactics were made against the Republican candidate. None of these allegations was proved, and Hanna took his seat in the Senate in January, 1897.

Hanna liked being in the Senate and the influence he enjoyed with his friend in the White House. He had a large voice in patronage decisions, especially in the South, and he was again important in the Republican campaign during the 1898 congressional elections. He advocated business consolidation into trusts, subsidies for the American merchant marine, and a canal across Central America. McKinley did not consult him as much on the large issues of foreign policy that grew out of the Spanish-American War. Initially, Hanna did not favor war with Spain over Cuba, but he accepted intervention when it came in April, 1898.

By 1900, the president and the senator had drifted apart. McKinley did not like the stories that Hanna dominated him, and some time passed before Hanna was named to head the Republican reelection drive in 1900. The vice presidential nomination in that year went to the New York governor and war hero, Theodore Roosevelt . Hanna did not trust the flamboyant Roosevelt. He asked those who were pushing him: “Don’t you understand that there is just one life between this crazy man and the presidency if you force me to take Roosevelt?” When McKinley refused to oppose the New Yorker, Hanna had no choice but to accept Roosevelt’s selection.

In the campaign, the Republican organization functioned even more smoothly than it had in 1896 against Bryan, who was once again the Democratic standard-bearer. With McKinley sitting out the canvass as an incumbent, Hanna went out on the stump and proved second only to Roosevelt as a speaking attraction. Senator Richard F. Pettigrew of South Dakota, a silver Republican, had become a bitter enemy of Hanna, and they had clashed on the Senate floor. The Ohioan campaigned against Pettigrew in his home state and helped to deny him reelection. As McKinley’s second term began, there was some talk of a Hanna candidacy for president in 1904.

McKinley’s assassination in September, 1901, and Roosevelt’s accession to the presidency shifted the political balance against Hanna. Much of his power over Republican patronage vanished when McKinley died. As the embodiment of corporate power in politics who was often depicted as a plutocrat in cartoons, Hanna would not have been a credible challenger to the young, popular, and forceful Roosevelt. Hanna knew this, and he never seriously entertained the prospect of disputing Roosevelt’s hold on the Republican nomination in 1904. At the same time, he was reluctant to acknowledge the new president’s preeminence too quickly. The resulting ambivalence placed Hanna in an awkward position during the last two years of his life. Friends in the conservative, probusiness wing of the Republican Party wanted him to be a candidate: That idea he resisted. However, he could not bring himself to endorse Roosevelt wholeheartedly. The Hanna-Roosevelt relationship became tense.

Hanna and Roosevelt did cooperate fruitfully in the settlement of the anthracite coal strike of 1902. A believer in the essential harmony of capital and labor, Hanna became active in and eventually chaired the National Civic Federation, which sought the elusive goal of industrial peace through arbitration and conciliation. When the coal miners struck in 1902, for higher wages and shorter hours, Hanna tried to persuade the coal operators to negotiate with their men. He assisted Roosevelt’s mediation efforts that finally brought a resolution of the dispute in October, 1902.

Within the Republican Party, Hanna remained the most plausible alternative to Roosevelt. His recommendation that the party should “stand pat” in the congressional elections of 1902 and make few concessions to reform contributed a phrase to the language of American politics and further endeared him to conservatives. Most of the talk about Hanna’s hopes was illusory, as an episode in the spring of 1903 revealed. Hanna’s old enemy, his senatorial colleague Foraker, asked that the Ohio Republican state convention endorse Roosevelt for the presidency. When Hanna hesitated to agree, the president sent him a public message that “those who favor my administration and nomination” would support Foraker’s idea “and those who do not will oppose them.” Hanna performed a “back-action-double-spring feat” and gave in.

Hanna was reelected to the Senate in 1903, after a difficult contest against the Democratic mayor of Cleveland, Tom L. Johnson. Hanna’s success revived talk of the White House, and Roosevelt prepared for a test of strength in the winter of 1904. Before it could come, however, Hanna fell ill with typhoid fever; he died in Washington, D.C., on February 15, 1904. Hanna had three children: Mabel Hanna had a mental disability and caused her parents much anguish, Ruth Hanna McCormick was active in Republican politics, and her brother Dan Hanna pursued a business career.

Significance

Despite two sympathetic biographies, Hanna’s reputation has never escaped the stereotypes that political opponents created during his lifetime. In fact, he was not the creator or mastermind of William McKinley but only a good friend and an efficient instrument who served the purposes of the twenty-fifth president. The Republicans won the presidential election of 1896 not because Hanna and his campaign organization bought votes or coerced industrial workers: With an appealing candidate, a divided opposition, and a popular program, Hanna used the money at his disposal to educate the electorate, not to manipulate it.

Hanna came to represent the power of big business in American politics. Part of that impression was deserved. He believed that size brought efficiency and a better standard of living. He also endorsed the protective tariff. At the same time, he thought that industrial workers should receive fair wages and a voice in the state of their working conditions. This view did not make him a New Dealer in the Gilded Age. It did reveal that his Republicanism had within it elements that explain why the GOP was the majority party of the nation between 1894 and 1929. As Theodore Roosevelt wrote of Hanna when he died: “No man had larger traits than Hanna. He was a big man in every way and as forceful a personality as we have seen in public life in our generation.” That was a fitting epitaph for one of the most important politicians in the age of McKinley and Roosevelt.

Bibliography

Beer, Thomas. Hanna. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929. Beer’s father was a political associate of Hanna, and this biography is written from an admiring point of view. It contains many shrewd insights and is a pleasure to read.

Blum, John Morton. The Republican Roosevelt. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954. Blum’s short study of Roosevelt has a chapter on the rivalry with Hanna from 1901 to 1904 that is important to understanding the senator’s career.

Croly, Herbert. Marcus Alonzo Hanna: His Life and Work. New York: Macmillan, 1912. Croly had access to the Hanna papers and interviews with the senator’s associates, and these documents are now at the Library of Congress in the Hanna-McCormick Family Papers. This is the best full biography of Hanna and is positive about his political achievements.

Crossen, Cynthia. “The Man Who Made Political Campaigns All About the Money.” Wall Street Journal (Eastern edition), March 24, 2004, p. B1. Describes how Hanna introduced new methods of fund-raising in American campaigns. Focuses on Hanna’s fund-raising and promotional efforts on behalf of William McKinley during the presidential campaign of 1896.

Gould, Lewis L. The Presidency of William McKinley. Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1980. Places Hanna’s role in McKinley’s career in the context of the presidency between 1897 and 1901. There are discussions of Hanna’s appointment to the Senate, his part in the election of 1900, and his relation to the president.

Jones, Stanley L. The Presidential Election of 1896. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964. Jones provides the fullest treatment of Hanna’s participation in the McKinley campaign. The book is richly documented and provides direction for further research into Hanna’s political career.

Leech, Margaret. In the Days of McKinley. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959. Leech’s is the most detailed study of McKinley as president, and there is much useful information about Hanna’s dealings with the White House and the administration.

Morgan, H. Wayne. William McKinley and His America. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1963. This is the best biography of McKinley, and Morgan offers a persuasive analysis of the Hanna-McKinley friendship as it affected his subject’s life and political career.

Phillips, Kevin. William McKinley. New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2003. This examination of McKinley’s presidency includes information about his rise to political prominence and the presidential campaign of 1896. One in a series of books about American presidents.

Williams, R. Hal. Years of Decision: American Politics in the 1890’s. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1978. Williams provides a penetrating look at the decade in which Hanna achieved national prominence. The book is essential for understanding why Hanna, McKinley, and the Republicans triumphed in this period.