system of the Cleveland City Railway Company was being improved, consolidated and extended, was as corrupt as that of the average American municipality. The council, to whom was intrusted the grant of franchises, was composed of petty local politicians whose votes usually had to be secured by some kind of influence. There was no effective reform sentiment in the community. A street railway company that applied for and needed particular franchises had to purchase this influence or else go out of business. Practically every street railway in the country which was confronted by this situation (few escaped it) adopted the alternative of buying either the needed votes or the needed influence.

The West Side Street Railway Company and its successors were no exception to this rule. It was confronted by competitors who had no scruples about employing customary methods, and if it had been more scrupulous than they, its competitors would have carried off all the prizes. Mr. Hanna had, as I have said, a way of making straight for his goal. He was peculiarly intolerant of a nagging, unenlightened opposition or anything resembling a "hold up." He and his company did what was necessary to obtain the additional franchises needed for the development of the system. The railroad contributed to local campaign committees and the election expenses of particular councilmen; and it did so for the purpose of exercising an effective influence over the action of the council in street railway matters.

Mr. Hanna had in the beginning fought against the increasing corruption of municipal politics in Cleveland; but he had soon yielded and adapted himself to conditions. He was not a reformer either by disposition or by creed. He was always interested at any particular time in accomplishing some definite practical result, and in order to do so he took men and methods as he found them. What distinguished him from other American business men and politicians who used similar methods was that the results which he wished to accomplish were usually good results.

In the case of the street railway he was very anxious to give a thoroughly good service, and he was ready to perform every public duty which could in his opinion be fairly imposed upon the

G

company. He neither expected to make extortionate profits, nor had he undertaken the business for that purpose. As a matter of fact the money he made in the enterprise was small compared to the time and energy which it had cost him. The stock of the company during his management never paid over four per cent, and the amount of water it contained, compared to other street railways, was exceedingly small-amounting to only about twenty-five per cent. Before the consolidation with the cable line the property of the company never had been bonded, because Mr. Hanna was opposed to paying dividends as long as the company was in debt. His financial, like his business, methods were thoroughly sound-as sound, to use his own analogy, as those of a savings bank.

At a later date, and before Mr. Hanna died, the Cleveland surface railroads became the storm centre of municipal politics in Cleveland. They were hauled before the court of public opinion by Tom L. Johnson, and rightly or wrongly they were condemned. Whatever faults they had committed they most assuredly expiated. But the fact that the verdict went against them should not be allowed to obscure their manifest good behavior compared to the really flagrant cases of street railway mismanagement in Chicago and New York.

Mark Hanna in particular was never an ordinary street railway financier. He had no interest in any street railway system outside of Cleveland, and the local system in which he was interested was a minor one, whose cars passed his own door, and in which he took the same sort of pride that a man might take in his own stable, carriages and horses. He had bought a collection of rusty rails, worm-eaten cars and tired horses, and had converted them by virtue of hard and patient work into an efficient railroad. His mental attitude towards his railroad was always determined by his early struggles and tribulations; and the memory of them prevented him from sufficiently understanding the difference between the conditions prevailing in the street railway business of Cleveland in 1882 and 1902.

Public opinion, however, came to recognize that the street railways had passed out of the pioneer stage; and for many years the local politics in Cleveland were dominated by the clash between the old and the new conception of the proper rela

tions between the city and the street railway companies. This clash began during Mr. Hanna's life. It was always a source of political embarrassment and weakness to him, because it involved him, as a national political leader, too much in a local political issue, and one on which public opinion was running against him. But embarrassing as it was, and much as one would like to see certain aspects of Mr. Hanna's street railway connection expunged from the record, he remained throughout the whole episode true to his own standards and characteristic personal tendencies. He had put himself into the street railway just as he had put himself into Rhodes & Co., the Union National Bank and the theatre; and he had become more of a man because of the personal expenditure. All his business enterprises were fundamentally personal investments, and returned to him something more and better than the wages of management and the current rate of interest.

CHAPTER IX

MARK HANNA AND HIS EMPLOYEES

THE relation between Mr. Hanna and the men who worked for him in his various enterprises demands special treatment, not only because of its intrinsic interest, but because of the importance which it came to have during his subsequent political career. In no phase of his business life are the essential traits of the man more clearly revealed.

Mark Hanna's business career began, as we have seen, in jumpers and overalls. When he told the students of the Western Reserve College not to be ashamed of overalls, he was not posing or offering an insincere piece of advice. No doubt he had graduated quickly from overalls himself, and he never was an ordinary day-laborer, but he started with and always retained a hearty sympathy with the wearers of overalls and a real understanding of them. As his interests multiplied and as he gave more and more time to politics, he was obliged to delegate to a large extent the management of his business; but until the end Mr. Hanna was more likely to interfere in questions relating to the treatment of the employees than in any other branch of his affairs.

I have described him as fundamentally an industrial pioneer, and in no aspect of his business life is the description more correct and more instructive in its implications than in his relations with his employees. The social life of the pioneers was essentially homogeneous. It was based upon good-fellowship and a freedom and frankness of intercourse. There were inequalities of wealth and position, but they did not interfere with ease and completeness of communication and with mutual sympathy and understanding. Before the ninth decade of the nineteenth century the early pioneer society of Ohio had disappeared. A vast difference had developed between the manner of life of a prosperous business man like Mr. Hanna and that of his

coal miners and freight handlers. But while the earlier homogeneity of life had vanished, no man could be true to the pioneer tradition without keeping a bond of communication with the ordinary day-laborer. The fact that Mark Hanna did do so distinguishes him sharply from the common run of very successful business men of his own generation. It is the final and best illustration of the fundamental humanity of his disposition, his practice and his point of view.

It is literally and not merely figuratively true that he kept in touch with his employees. Everybody in his employment felt free to go to him at any time. No matter whether the man was the head of a department or a common laborer on the docks, he had access to his employer. "I never knew," says Mr. Leonard C. Hanna, "my brother to turn any man away. In our business we dealt almost entirely with common, unskilled labor, and in all the interests which the firm owned and directed I suppose we had six thousand employees. We never had serious labor troubles. On our docks we occasionally had local and temporary disturbances among the ordinary employees; and whenever these occurred it was always my brother's custom to go right among the men. He would not ignore the superintendent, but would take the latter with him to the dock and hear what the men had to say. Then he would take such action as he thought to be necessary." The following despatch from Ashtabula, printed in the Cleveland Leader of April 28, 1876, may serve as a comment on the foregoing statement: "This morning Mr. Hanna, of Rhodes & Co., met the striking laborers on the docks at Ashtabula Harbor, and after consultation the men accepted the terms offered and resumed work."

Mr. Hanna's accessibility to his employees was not merely physical. When they reached him he always heard patiently and considered fairly what they had to say. If they had any real grievances, reparation was promptly and freely made. If they were making demands which in his opinion were neither fair nor possible, he had the gift of telling them so frankly, while at the same time not arousing any hard feeling. He could talk their language, and he could establish a common ground of good feeling which permitted full discussion of differences and which usually resulted in their adjustment.