CHAPTER VI. MARCUS ALONZO HANNA. THE KEY TO HIS SUCCESS-A TYPICAL AMERICAN PARENTAGE LEAVES COLLEGE AND BEGINS WORK - HIS EARLY BUSINESS ENTERPRISES WHY HE ENTERED POLTHE CAMPAIGN OF 1896 A CONVENNOT A BOSS AS AN ORATORATTITUDE TOWARD LA BUSINESS METHODS BOR. INDUSTRY. The question came up in our family councils whether I should go to work or go to college. I wanted to go to work. My mother said I should go to college, so I went. I was young, innocent, confiding. One day some of the sophomores induced me to help distribute copies of a burlesque program of the exercises of the junior class. I stood on the steps handing them to the audience as they passed in. The president of the college came along. He grasped me by the shoulder and asked, "Young man, what are you doing?" I replied that I was distributing literature in the interests of education and morality. I quit college soon after that. I had on One day the president met me on the street. blue overalls, and was hard at work. He looked at me with an expression which seemed to say, "Well, I guess you have found your right place!" and I thought so, too. I liked work better than study. I have been hard at work ever since. Boys, don't be ashamed of work or overalls. Шаната ARCUS ALONZO HANNA is an American type. The story of his life epitomizes the biographies of thousands of other successful Americans. It is the dramatization of energy - the romance of industrial achievement. In another one hundred years, perhaps, such romances will seem as remote from the life then living as stories of our Western border, bloody with Indian wars, appear to-day. Opportunity may not always stand knocking on the gate for American youths. But at any rate, the story of Senator Hanna's rise is a brave tale, and one well worth the telling. Senator Hanna was born in Ohio sixty-five years ago. Of his ancestry it is sufficient to say that he is a member of the Scotch-Irish society of Philadelphia, in full communion and good standing. His grandfather was bound out to a Quaker, and for the one hundred years last past the Hannas have been Quakers. In 1852 the Senator's father moved to Cleveland, and brought his seven children along. The elder Hanna started a grocery store, trading, more or less, in a wholesale way, on the lakes, particularly in the Lake Superior country. Young Mark plodded through the public schools and got enough education to admit him to the Western Reserve University. But in 1857, after a year in college, he returned to Cleveland to learn the grocery business, which was growing, and had become exclusively a wholesale concern, with customers all over the lake region. A year or so later the elder Hanna sickened, and the management of the store fell on the boy, Mark. It was a heavy load to carry for a young man barely past his majority, but the responsibility put iron into him, and gave him the luck-stone of his life - the habit of industry. It schooled him, as no university can, in the uses of grit and self-reliance and courage. It made a man of him at the time of life when other youths are addicted to the picnic habit. In 1862 Mark's father died, and the young man took charge of the business for the estate. When he closed up the store successfully five years later, he knew all about the grocery business, and his energy was proverbial in the town of Cleveland. At the age of thirty he married, and went into business with his father-in-law, Daniel P. Rhodes. The firm Rhodes. & Co. dealt in coal, iron ore, and pig iron. That was a generation ago. Young Hanna threw himself into that busi ness with passionate enthusiasm. He learned the iron trade from the bottom, omitting no circumstance. He was insatiably curious. He had an artist's thirst to know the how of things. He learned about coal mines and bought coal lands, learned about ore and bought mines, learned about boats and bought boats. Then he took his iron and his coal, and he built the first steel boats that ever plowed the lakes. He established foundries and forges and smelters. Men worked for him from western Pennsylvania to the base of the Rockies. He knew his men and he knew the work they did. He knew the value of a day's work, and he got it- he also paid for it. Where there was labor trouble the contest was short and decisive. The employer met the men himself. Either things were right or they were wrong. If he thought they were wrong, he fixed them on the spot. If he believed they were right, the work went on. In the early seventies the miners in the Rhodes & Co.'s mines formed a union. Mark Hanna studied the union as he studied mines and ores and ships. He mastered its details, got the hang of it, and got up another union - a union of employers. Then when the men at a mine had troubles, they conferred, not with the mine operator, but with the mine operators' union. The two unions got along without friction, until the walking delegate found himself deposed, after which Hanna's union dissolved. But the mining operators' union gave the first public recognition to organized labor which it had received at that time, and the invention was Hanna's. It was a practical thing. After the dissolution of the mine operators' union there was trouble. A number of arrests followed some shaft burning. Hanna went down to western Ohio to prosecute the men under arrest. They were defended by a young man named McKinley - William McKinley and he did his work so well that most of the miners went scot-free, and those convicted got short terms. Hanna took a liking to the young lawyer whose tactics had won the legal battle which Hanna had lost. A friendship began which is now famous in contemporaneous history. Hanna had won his point in the strike. Perhaps he was in a mellow, expansive mood which may have tempered his admiration for the attorney for the strikers. The regularity with which Mark Hanna won in his labor contests gave him business prestige. He says that he never let the men deal fairer with him than he dealt with them. His office door swings inward as easily on its hinges for the dollar-a-day man as for the superintendent. But they say in Cleveland that there is an automatic spring on it for the chronic grumbler, for the shirker, and for the walking delegate. The door swings out upon these men with force and emphasis. Mark Hanna is a hard worker. He asks none of his employees to work as hard as he does. He has the intelligence which makes work easy and increases the capacity to do work. Genius is something of that sort. Hanna's secret is system. After he had reduced mining to a system, he added shipping, then he reduced that to a system and took on shipbuilding. Reducing that to its lowest terms, where the machinery works smoothly, he built a street railway-made the cars of his coal and iron, and the rails of his steel. When he came to man that railway- the Cleveland City Street Railway - he had reduced the labor problem to such an exact science that there has never been a strike on that system, although the cars of other lines in Cleveland are tied up frequently. About this time Mark took a fancy to the theatrical business. He bought the town opera house and began studying the gentle art of making friends with the theatrical stars of the world. He learned the business of friendship thus as thoroughly as he learned the iron and coal and steel and ship and railway businesses. He omitted no detail; he went the whole length - put on a play by Mr. Howells and invited the author out to see the job done properly. To-day Hanna has the friendship of men like Jefferson, Irving, Francis Wilson, Robson, Crane,- all of them, and the best of the playwrights. They know the appreciative eyes that laugh so easily, and he knows all the actors' stories and can find the paths that lead to their hearts. In the early eighties, apparently by the way of diversion, when the coal, iron ore, pig iron, steel, shipping, railway, and theatrical business became nerve-racking monotony, Hanna started a bank. He took the presidency of it, and devoured the minutiae of the new business ravenously. When he was watching the wheels go around, looking at the levers and cogs, and making the bank part of his life, he began to notice remarkable movements in the works. Some years the flywheel would not revolve. At some times it whirled too rapidly. He went through the machinery with hammer and screws, but he found that the trouble lay outside the bank. He traced it to iron ore, through that to coal, and still it eluded him. The trouble was outside the things he knew. It was in the lodestone of politics. So Hanna went into politics. With a modesty which is remarkable, he played an important part in the Garfield campaign of 1880 by cleverly bringing about a meeting between Garfield and Roscoe Conkling, who had been sulking in retirement because his plan to renominate General Grant had failed. Nothing except the voting that ended the campaign was of more importance to the Republican party and its candidate than this meeting of the New York chieftain and the nominee of the party. During this campaign Senator Hanna actively interested himself, as a friend and admirer of the candidate, in national politics, but in what then seemed a small way. What he did was to organize the Business Men's League, beginning it in Cleveland, yet helping it to spread until its silent force of organized work and influential opinion, and its help in drawing campaign funds from men of large means, made it so powerful that the politicians who said that Hanna was "only a business man came to lean upon it -without knowing that it was the offspring of this mere business man's brain. The general public paid no heed to this powerful organization beyond applauding the great "parades" of merchants which became a feature of all subsequent campaigns. Thus we see with new interest the form and manner of the bow made by this hard-working, thrifty, friend-compelling descendant of traders and scion of old Quaker stock, when he entered the great arena of national politics. Being a practical man and a business man, given to the clannish habits of the Scotch and Irish, and the smooth and shrewd methods of the Quakers, he carried all these forces into politics and began his work on business principles with a league of business men. In 1884 he went to the National Republican convention as a delegate pledged to support John Sherman. Four years later he went to the next convention as one of the managers of |