Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [20]
Hanna was born in Ohio in 1837 to a Virginia Quaker and a Vermont Presbyterian. “So Scotch and Irish, the staid, determined Quaker and the rigid blood of the Puritan crossed in the child,” the Tribune observed after Hanna’s arrival in New York in August 1896. “The result is somehow apparent in the quiet, sturdy insistence of the man who is today wielding a President-making power.” Hanna worked as a clerk in his father’s wholesale grocery and provision business, taking the firm over after his father’s death in 1861. A few years later Hanna married Augusta Rhodes, daughter of an Ohio coal and iron tycoon, whose various interests Hanna reorganized as M. A. Hanna and Co. Having also inherited from his father a lake schooner used in the grocery business, Hanna began improving the shipbuilding side of the firm until he became the largest steel ship-builder on the Great Lakes as head of the firm Globe Iron Works Company. By 1896 the Ohio millionaire had diversified into oil, banking, city railways, and a controlling interest in the Cleveland Herald.
With Hanna’s backing, McKinley’s star began to rise. Even with all of his own noble characteristics, McKinley certainly benefited from Hanna’s support of American business interests. In 1889 Hanna had traveled to Washington to back McKinley in a failed bid to become Speaker of the House. Though this position would have meant much power over subsequent national legislation, the consolation prize that year of the Ways and Means Committee chairmanship served both men’s interests quite well. As chairman of the committee McKinley introduced the bill that would become the 1890 McKinley Tariff.
This was only the beginning of McKinley’s meteoric rise. Two years later McKinley became Ohio governor and, perhaps more importantly, permanent chairman of the national party convention, which was being held in Minneapolis that year. Although the Republican nominee, President Benjamin Harrison, lost to Grover Cleveland in 1892, McKinley emerged from the convention extremely popular and the party favorite for 1896.
Traditionally, potential presidential nominees did not attend the national conventions. Instead candidates for the nomination let their supporters speak for them in the convention halls and hotel corridors, while they stayed at home awaiting the news. Unlike Bryan, McKinley followed tradition and did not attend the convention in St. Louis that June. Hanna and other Ohio power brokers pressed the flesh and made deals in dimly lit rooms filled with blue cigar smoke. On June 18, the day of the convention vote, McKinley sat in his library in his Canton home, surrounded by a few associates and newspapermen. Out in the parlor a group of ladies attended to his wife. Upstairs in the hallway telegraph machines delivered the latest news from the convention hall, while Mrs. McKinley’s cousin Sam Saxton relayed messages from the telephone. When the men in the library heard over the wire that the Ohio delegation had nominated McKinley, they anxiously awaited news of the crowd’s reaction.
Fifteen minutes passed, then half an hour. Had the convention simply listened politely to McKinley’s nomination before moving on to another candidate? Perhaps the telephone was not working. McKinley lifted the receiver himself to find that someone had left the convention hall phone’s circuit open, and he heard for himself the ongoing pandemonium. A full half hour after his name had been put forward for the Republican candidacy for president, the hall still resounded with cheers. For these men of the late nineteenth century, including Civil War veterans, it was an eerie experience, listening to events