Books: Lucky Hanna

HANNA—Thomas Beer—Knopf ($4). The Man. "Hanna's luck" was proverbial, but like so many easy explanations of success it will not bear scrutiny. Even in business he had his ups and downs; in politics no less. For five years he, a millionaire, tried to make a newspaper pay, and failed. But he was lucky in his name. That name, with its blended suggestions of some old Roman or Carthaginian proconsul, was no title for a mediocrity; Mark Hanna sounded best as either a bum or a conqueror. He was a conqueror. Marcus Alonzo Hanna, son of Leonard Hanna, well-to-do wholesale grocer and ship owner, was born in New Lisbon, Ohio, in 1837. All his life Ohio was his empire. Until the Presidential campaign of 1896, when Bryan, the silver-tongued prophet of Free Silver, ran against Hanna's man McKinley, he was hardly known outside Ohio's borders. He worked at his father's grocery and shipping business until he had made a fortune out of it; married Charlotte Augusta Rhodes, daughter of Coal-and-Iron-King Daniel Rhodes, lost his fortune and went into partnership with his father-in-law. Soon Rhodes & Co. became M. A. Hanna & Co. Long before he showed his whole political hand Hanna began to take an interest in politics. He attended the Republican conventions of 1888 and 1892, but he bided his time and saw how things were done. Then in 1896, when he was ready, when he had found his man William McKinley, he quietly retired from business, went into politics with a bang, and put his candidate across on the first ballot. From that time until Death came for him in his Washington mansion (1904), Mark Hanna, as Senator from Ohio, "minister without portfolio," leader of the Senate, was very much in politics. In Ohio he was politics. Now and then someone was foolhardy enough to oppose him in his own state. One such, Robert McKisson, a Mayor of Cleveland with Senatorial aspirations, found in 1898 that Hanna's threatening figure was not a mirage. When McKinley was shot and the unpredictable Theodore Roosevelt stumbled delightedly into the White House (1901), Hanna's fall was hourly expected. But it never came. There was still plenty of useful data in the unaccredited minister's portfolio.