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Mark Hanna

Marcus Alonzo "Mark" Hanna (24 September 1837-15 February 1904) was a Republican US Senator from Ohio from 5 March 1897 to 15 February 1904, succeeding John Sherman and preceding Charles W.F. Dick. As chair of the Republican National Committee from 1896 to 1904, Hanna was a powerful political boss who played a major role in the Republican Party's rightward realignment following the 1896 presidential election, and he emerged as the leader of the conservative Standpatter faction of the GOP in opposition to President Theodore Roosevelt's progressive faction during the early 1900s.

Biography[]

Marcus Alonzo Hanna was born in New Lisbon, Ohio on 24 September 1837, and he worked for his family's grocery business before serving in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Hanna became a businessman in Cleveland after the war, joining his father-in-law to form the Rhodes and Company coal and steel company, which had close dealings with the railroads. Hanna became involved in politics during Ulysses S. Grant's first term, and he was elected to the Cleveland Board of Education in 1869. Hanna was opposed to the influence of Republican party bosses on Cleveland politics and backed a reformist Democrat for Mayor in 1873. Hanna went on to become a newspaper impresario and a millionaire by his 40th birthday in 1877, and he actively supported James A. Garfield's 1880 presidential campaign and befriended the US Senator John Sherman and a rising star in the US House of Representatives, William McKinley, both of whom were Ohioans. Hanna supported Sherman's presidential bids in 1880 and 1884 and McKinley's political campaigns in Ohio in the early 1890s, and, in 1895, he worked with Southern Republican leaders and Northern political bosses such as Matthew Quay and Thomas C. Platt to secure McKinley's presidential nomination in 1896. Hanna devoted himself full-time to McKinley's election, engaging in record-breaking fundraising to secure his friend's victory over the liberal William Jennings Bryan. After Sherman became Secretary of State in 1897, Hanna was elected to fill his seat in the US Senate, and he continued to serve as the power behind the throne during the McKinley administration, with William Randolph Hearst's newspapers blaming Hanna for the delay in intervening in the Cuban War of Independence; the Quaker Hanna, like the cautious McKinley, had opposed the Spanish-American War. After the war, however, he supported the annexation of Puerto Rico and Guam. Suffering from rheumatisms, Hanna was unable to play a major role in McKinley's 1900 re-election bid, but he was at McKinley's side after he was mortally wounded by the anarchist assassin Leon Czolgosz. McKinley's successor Theodore Roosevelt obtained Hanna's political backing in exchange for Roosevelt agreeing to carry out McKinley's agenda and ceasing to call Hanna "Old Man", with Hanna threatening to call Roosevelt by his dreaded nickname "Teddy" if he did not. Hanna supported the construction of the Panama Canal, and he also became the leader of the conservative Standpatter faction of national Republican politics, opposing some of Roosevelt's more progressive policies. Hanna was widely seen as a likely presidential contender in 1904, but Hanna hesitated and soon fell ill with typhoid fever, and he died in 1904 at the age of 66. Hanna was credited with inventing the modern presidential campaign, having revolutionized campaign tactics and fundraising.

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