(b. New Lisbon, Ohio, 24 Sept. 1837; d. 15 Feb. 1904) US; US Senator 1897 – 1904 The son of a doctor who became a wholesale grocery merchant, Hanna attended local schools in Cleveland, Ohio, where his family lived from 1852, and Western Reserve College, Hudson, Ohio. In 1858 he entered a copper and iron ore firm, a subsidiary of his father's business, and rapidly worked his way up from labourer in the warehouse, to bookkeeper, salesman, and purser on one of the firm's ships. After his father's death, in 1862, he became a partner in the business with his uncle. He continued to manage the firm, with an interlude of 100 days devoted to defending Washington during the Civil War, until 1867, when he sold his share and entered a business association with his father-in-law. Thereafter he turned his hand successfully to a wide range of business ventures including: copper; blast furnaces; street railways; shipping; banking and publishing.

Hanna's interest in business was complemented by an interest in Republican party politics. He was one of the new breed of party bosses to emerge after the 1883 Civil Service Reform Act curbed patronage as a source of revenue and prompted politicians to turned increasingly to big business for money and support. He played an active part in every political campaign from 1867 until his death. Between 1888 and 1900 he was de facto Republican "king-maker" managing Senator John Sherman's successful bid for the party's presidential nomination in 1888, William McKinley's in 1892, and persuaded the party to nominate McKinley on the first ballot at the 1896 national convention. Selected as chairman of the Republican national committee in 1896, he became a key figure in national politics. McKinley's victory over William Jennings Bryan, the choice of both the Populists and the Democrats, in the election that year is widely attributed to Hanna's fund-raising and skills of political management.

A year later, in 1897, Hanna became US Senator for Ohio, appointed to complete a year's unexpired term of John Sherman who had accepted a post in McKinley's Cabinet. The following year he won a full term in the Senate after a contested election in the state legislature, and was re-elected for a further term but died before taking his seat. During his time in the Senate he remained a dominant figure in his party and an influential adviser to McKinley and then Theodore Roosevelt.

Businessman, politician, and U.S. senator, Marcus Alonzo Hanna (1837-1904) managed the election of President William McKinley and was a leading spokesman for enlightened capitalism.

Mark Hanna was born on Sept. 24, 1837, in New Lisbon (now Lisbon), Ohio. His parents were well educated. Young Hanna enjoyed material comfort and relative social privilege. When the family moved to Cleveland in 1852, he completed public school and attended Western Reserve College briefly.

Business permeated Hanna's youthful environment and immediately absorbed his energies. He became a full partner in the family grocery firm after his father's death in 1862. Following his marriage in 1864, he launched ventures in lake transportation and oil refining, areas of enterprise that were also attracting his Cleveland schoolmate John D. Rockefeller. Hanna later joined his father-in-law in a large iron and coal firm.

Politics, a vigorous Ohio tradition, early engaged Hanna's attention, and he embraced the Republican party instinctively. To his father-in-law, a fervent Democrat, he seemed "a damned screecher for freedom." In reality, despite this appearance and later skirmishes with Cleveland's ward bosses in the 1870s, Hanna was no reformer, but he realized that business and politics were becoming increasingly related. He lent his organizational talents and money to the Ohio Republicans who sought the presidency between 1880 and 1900: James A. Garfield, John Sherman, and William McKinley. He helped elect McKinley governor of Ohio in 1891 and president in 1896 and 1900. His management of the McKinley campaigns marked the successful application of business skills to American politics. Between 1897 and his death Hanna served in the Senate. He was a trusted presidential adviser to McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, despite his opposition to many of the latter's policies.

Although labeled "dollar Mark" by opponents, Hanna was no mere moneygrubber. The gold standard, high tariff, and large corporations - all of which he defended - seemed means to ensure general prosperity by stabilizing capitalism. For similar reasons he defended labor's right to organize and strike. After 1900 he championed ship subsidies and an Isthmian canal to increase America's power through international trade.

Although Hanna introduced the phrase "stand pat" into the American vocabulary, his dream of domestic and international order through responsible capitalism was not a formula for do-nothingism. His instinctive idealism and his concern for the public weal represented the best of American Whig attitudes. Unfortunately for his reputation, he became, even before his death, a symbol of many reactionary business attitudes that he had personally condemned.

Further Reading

Herbert D. Croly, Marcus Alonzo Hanna (1912), the standard biography, is sometimes overly sympathetic. Thomas Beer, Hanna (1929), is a bright, cynical study by the son of one of Hanna's associates. H. Wayne Morgan, William McKinley and His America (1963), describes Hanna's role with balanced sympathy.

For more information on Mark Hanna, visit Britannica.com.

(1837-1904), U.S. senator; the greatest of the businessmen-in-politics who rose to power hand in hand with machine politicians in late- nineteenth-century America. Mark Hanna was a representative figure as well as a prime mover. His ancestry, region, occupation, and lifestyle put him solidly within the cultural core of Republicanism, thus preparing him to play a pivotal role in the turn-of-the-century transformation of the gop.

There was nothing up-from-the-bottom about Hanna the businessman. His was a family steeped in entrepreneurship. Investment reverses and a declining local economy drove the Hannas from New Lisbon, Ohio, to Cleveland in the 1850s, and it was in that city that he established his business and began his political careers. He married the daughter of Cleveland's leading coal and iron merchant, and his talent and connections enabled him to make M. A. Hanna and Company one of the city's leading enterprises.

From the early 1880s on, Hanna had the money and the time to devote himself to politics. He was strategically located to do so, for Ohio in those years was the party's keystone state. The presidential aspirants to whom Hanna attached himself--James A. Garfield in 1880, John Sherman in 1884 and 1888, William McKinley thereafter--were Ohio politicians.

At first Hanna contented himself with money raising and campaign managing. In this he followed in the footsteps of other businessmen turned president-makers such as the Republican Stephen B. Elkins, who managed James G. Blaine's 1884 campaign, or the Democrat William C. Whitney, who served Grover Cleveland. But the campaign of 1896--that emblematic confrontation between the new world of corporate wealth and urban middle-class America, on the one hand, and rural discontent in the South and West, on the other--forced Hanna (as well as American politics at large) into a new mold. He became the Republican national chairman after McKinley won the nomination and ran the most highly centralized, ideological, abundantly financed (in great part by corporations) campaign to that time.

Hanna's money and power--and his exceptional personal and managerial skills--won him the U.S. senatorship from Ohio in 1897. He had no taste for large policy, though he did show an interest in conservation and a distaste for the primitive anti-unionism of many of his business peers. But the same qualities of intelligence and personality that made him successful in business and gop politics thrust him into the leadership of the Senate. At the same time, for much of the country he was "Dollar Mark" (as the Hearst political cartoonist Homer Davenport so devastatingly portrayed him)--the prototype of plutocracy turned to politics. In fact he was neither ogre nor kindly paternalist but one of those uninhibitedly strong and self-confident men of affairs who strode across the American business and political scene around the turn of the century: embodiments of a newly imperial nation. The question of where Hanna might eventually have wound up--in the White House? in disgrace?--became moot with his death in 1904.

Bibliography:

Thomas Beer, Hanna, Crane, and the Mauve Decade (1941); Herbert D. Croly, Marcus Alonzo Hanna: His Life and Work (1912).

Author:

Morton Keller

See also Elections: 1896; McKinley, William.

(Mark Hanna), 1837–1904, American capitalist and politician, b. New Lisbon (now Lisbon), Ohio. He attended Western Reserve College for a short time, then entered his father's wholesale grocery and commission business at Cleveland in 1858. He became a partner in 1862 and rapidly developed as a characteristic American capitalist of the Gilded Age. Hanna became a dealer in coal and iron mines, furnaces, lake shipping and shipbuilding; his financial enterprises included ownership of a bank, a newspaper, an opera house, and a street-railway system. He was active in politics and by 1890 was the ruling power in the Ohio Republican party. He was instrumental in having William McKinley elected governor of Ohio in 1891 and again in 1893. Hanna saved McKinley's reputation when financial ruin threatened, groomed him for the presidency in 1895, and was responsible for his nomination by the Republicans in 1896. As chairman of the Republican National Committee, Hanna boldly made that campaign a defense of business and property against the doctrines of the Democrats enunciated by William Jennings Bryan; on that basis he received heavy financial contributions from big business. He was appointed Senator from Ohio in 1897 after John Sherman resigned and was subsequently elected to the seat. Hanna continued to dominate Republican party councils until he died. He supported ship subsidies and advocated construction of the Panama Canal, opposing the Nicaraguan route. At the time of his death Hanna was being considered as a possible presidential candidate by old guard Republicans disenchanted with Theodore Roosevelt's progressive policies. Although sympathetic at times to organized labor, Hanna looked upon the great industrialists as the natural leaders of the country. His leadership of the party exemplified the union between business and politics for the purposes of economic policy rather than for personal graft.

Bibliography

See biographies by H. Croly (1912, repr. 1965) and T. Beer (1929, repr. 1973); M. Leech, In the Days of McKinley (1959); C. A. Stern, Resurgent Republicanism: The Handiwork of Hanna (1968).

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