had a certain bearing on Mr. Hanna's subsequent political career, it must be told in some detail. His interest in the matter originated in an attempt made by certain friends and associates to give renewed life to an old, well-established, but decayed local journal. At one time the Cleveland Herald had been the most influential organ of the Republican party in northern Ohio, and the only prosperous newspaper in the city of Cleveland. But owing to the death of one of its owners and the bad management of the remaining partner, both its circulation and its prestige fell away. In the meantime the Cleveland Leader, which was edited and for the most part owned by Edwin Cowles, was gradually taking its place. Later the Herald was bought by Richard C. Parsons and William Perry Fogg. Colonel Parsons, a former Congressional representative, a politician of considerable influence, and a cultured and able man, became its editor; and Mr. Fogg, a dealer in crockery, took charge of the business management. They put both additional capital and energy into the Herald and made it a good newspaper, but all to no purpose. They could not either shake the standing of the Leader or restore the Herald to its former position. The new owners could not stand the strain. Their losses threatened to ruin them, and they had to sell out.

William Perry Fogg retired, and Colonel Parsons persuaded a number of prominent men in Cleveland to come to his assistance. The new owners of the paper were a syndicate consisting of J. H. Wade, who laid the foundation of the Western Union Telegraph system; Henry Chisholm, the founder of the Cleveland Rolling Mill Company, the great local steel works; John D. Rockefeller and H. M. Flagler; Amasa Stone, the fatherin-law of John Hay; S. T. Everett, Dan P. Eels, a banker, Elias Sims, one of the owners of the West Side Street Railway and Mark Hanna. An abler and more successful group of business men would have been hard to find in Cleveland or elsewhere, but they were failures as the publishers of a newspaper. The Leader continued to prosper and the Herald to lose money. Finally the weary millionnaires refused to pay any more assessments. Colonel Parsons retired for good, and the property passed into the control of Mr. Hanna and a few associates, with the former as president of the company. The new

management, which took control early in 1880, immediately made an ingenious and vigorous attempt to rehabilitate the property and at the same time to crush its competitor. Every editor and reporter employed by the Leader who was supposed to be contributing to its success, was taken over by the Herald on the theory that the man behind the gun rather than the captain of the ship won its battles. The new staff are said to have boasted that they would do for the Herald what they thought they had already done for the Leader. In the meantime, certain former employees of the Herald went over to the Leader, one of them being Mr. James B. Morrow, who subsequently became the editor of that paper.

Mr. Edwin Cowles, editor and owner of the Leader, bitterly resented both the way in which the new management of the Herald began its attack and the boasts of his former staff. He was a journalist after the manner of Horace Greeleya blind partisan, a bitter and abusive controversialist, but a man of ability and weight. He regarded the desertion of his former staff as base treachery, and he had no scruples about allowing his personal grievances to dominate the editorial policy of his paper. The Herald, and Mark Hanna as its financial backer, became the object of a copious stream of vituperation and ridicule.

Throughout the next five years, Mr. Cowles used every available opportunity of making the publishing business disagreeable for Mr. Hanna. The abuse was coarse and clumsy. The editorial staff of the Herald was referred to as "Mark Hanna and his gang," and his management of the paper was described as "the reign of Marcus Aurelius." Neither did Mr. Cowles confine himself to editorial assaults. Mr. Hanna was becoming conspicuous in local politics, and was interested in candidates for local offices. Wherever such an interest became manifest, Mr. Hanna's candidate could always count on the opposition of the Leader; and when Mr. Hanna tried to get himself elected delegate to the Republican Convention of 1884, Mr. Cowles became an opposing candidate and beat him at the primaries. To a man like Edwin Cowles every fight was a personal fight, and all methods were fair in war.

To these attacks Mr. Hanna never replied in kind, and he

was probably very much surprised at the hornet's nest which he had stirred up. Of course the Herald announced its contempt for the Leader with the politeness characteristic of American journalism of that period; but its owner avoided anything like a personal squabble. The Herald was a sideissue with him. He never gave very much attention or time to its management, and even the brilliant bit of strategy with which he began the campaign indicated an intention of disposing of the enemy by a grand coup rather than by hard and patient personal work. The grand coup failed. Mr. Cowles was, according to the standard of the day, an able journalist; and he was an angry man, fighting with his back to the wall for all that he had in the world. At that time there was room in Cleveland for only one prosperous Republican morning newspaper. Not unnaturally the survivor proved to be the Leader. In March, 1885, Mark Hanna decided to quit. His newspaper enterprise had cost him a good deal of money, and he had not even enjoyed a good time in the spending of it. The name of the Herald, its good-will and its subscription list were sold to the Leader for $80,000. Its plant and visible property found a purchaser in the Plain-Dealer. The Leader celebrated its victory in an editorial article, which described its defeated competitor as an able and a fair antagonista fact which no one could have suspected from a perusal of the Leader's pages a few weeks earlier.

Thereafter the Leader ceased its personal attacks on Mr. Hanna; but in the opinion of men who watched the whole affair, these attacks had something to do with the establishment of a false impression of Mr. Hanna's personality in the minds of many of his fellow-townsmen. In the succeeding years he became more and more conspicuous in local business and politics, and the kind of attack which a Republican newspaper had begun was continued, although with less persistence, by Democrats. The Plain-Dealer referred to him, sometimes obscurely and sometimes overtly, as a "Boss" and as an aggressive and a greedy man. The Press, an afternoon newspaper, which was seeking to attract popular attention by assaults on conspicuous citizens, took for a while a corresponding line of comment. He was pictured as overbearing, grasping and as

indifferent to the rights of others. An attempt was made to prejudice popular opinion against him by representing him as hostile to the business prosperity of Cleveland. The lease, assumed by M. A. Hanna & Co., of the docks of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, at Ashtabula was cited as a nefarious attempt to divert commerce from Cleveland and to snatch the bread out of the mouths of its working-men. Such misrepresentations continued for many years and contributed to establish locally a distorted popular impression of Mr. Hanna long before he became a national political leader.

Mark Hanna was as far as possible from being a callous man. His expansive and sociable disposition, and the strong ties which bound him to his own city and people, made him extremely susceptible to the injustice of this personal misrepresentation. But he had too much good sense to wince in public or to indulge in personal recriminations. He was a fighter by nature, and whenever he saw a good chance of replying to a specific case of misrepresentation, he always took it, but for the most part he bore it with silence, if not with indifference.

In assuming the management of the Herald, Mark Hanna had no ulterior purpose. He did not attempt to make his unprofitable newspaper pay by using it to advance his other business interests. Mr. J. H. A. Bone, who was managing-editor of the Herald, when it was sold to the Leader, stated that Mr. Hanna never meddled with the editorial department and rarely came to the office. Street railway questions were more or less discussed in the City Council, and Mark Hanna was even then the practical owner of a street railway, but he never asked the Herald to take one side or the other. When Mr. Bone was in doubt about the attitude which the paper should assume in reference to some political matter of importance, he sometimes consulted Mr. Hanna; but he declares emphatically that his employer never made any attempt to convert the Herald into a personal organ or into the covert promoter of his own private interests. He was a Republican, and the Herald was a Republican newspaper. Beyond that he had no personal political policy.

Mr. Hanna's connection with the Cleveland Herald, inci

dental as it was in his business life, constituted in a sense the beginning of his public career. It was the first evidence, that is, of his assumption of a certain importance in the public affairs of Cleveland. His personal force was making itself felt beyond the limits of his immediate business associations; and the very misrepresentations which were coincident with the beginning of his public life were an indirect tribute to the salience of his personality. From the outset he took a strong line of his own and by his methods in pushing along this line he both aroused enmities and conquered friends. Particularly during his early career he did not attempt to conciliate opposition. He made straight for his goal, and if any one stood in his way, the obstacle was usually and often roughly shoved aside.

The characteristic of making hard and straight for a goal could easily be confused with a domineering disposition. Such a confusion took place in Mr. Hanna's case and is responsible for the accusations of being a "Boss" which were levelled at him almost from the start. But the impulse to dominate and to succeed is very different from the impulse to domineer. He always wanted power. He always wanted to place himself at the head of his associates in the prosecution of any joint enterprise. He was sometimes intolerant of opposition, impatient with meddlers and procrastinators, brusque in manner and explosive in speech. Men who later became his friends and allies were repulsed by their first superficial acquaintance with him. But he was never a domineering man. His leadership was always founded on personal energy and efficiency, and on his ability to make other people believe in him; and as men knew better they believed in him and trusted him the more. His work and his methods were such that he was bound to create enmities; but his enemies could not accuse him of injustice any more than his friends could complain of lack of consideration. He always played fair, even if he did not always play politely; and when he sat in a game he usually won, and he usually occupied or came to occupy a seat at the head of the table.

In 1884 Mark Hanna started another outside enterprise, which was destined to be more successful than his excursion into the field of publishing. He organized the Union