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in the foregoing statement. Other members of the Convention state that Mr. Hanna had in his trunk more tickets to the Convention than he could have obtained in any way save by their purchase from negro delegates. Such practices were common at the time; but they were indefensible, and if they evoked a protest from Mr. Foraker, he deserves credit for the protest. The split in the delegation must, however, be traced to a wholly different cause.

Rightly or wrongly, not only Mr. Hanna, but the other leading members of the delegation believed that Mr. Foraker was secretly hostile to Senator Sherman's nomination, and that this hostility ruined Mr. Sherman's chance of success. The intimate association between the two men ended in June, 1888. After the Convention they exchanged a few acrimonious letters in respect to the distribution and settlement of the expenses incurred at Chicago. Their correspondence ceased. It was not renewed for many years, and then only on rare occasions and for purposes in which, as the two Senators from Ohio, they had a joint official interest.

The story of Mark Hanna's friendship with Mr. Foraker and its rupture has been told at some length, because the incident did much to determine the course of Mr. Hanna's subsequent political career. In case he had remained intimately associated with Mr. Foraker, he might never have become so intimately associated with Mr. McKinley. Mr. Foraker himself ventures the opinion that their break resulted indirectly in the nomination of McKinley. However that may be, the continuation of his intimacy with Mr. Foraker would probably have prevented him from attaching himself thereafter so ardently and so exclusively to Mr. McKinley's political advancement. The rupture of his first political friendship did more, however, than clear the path for the formation of the second. His more intimate association with Mr. McKinley was in a measure the immediate result of his break with Mr. Foraker.

The behavior of Mr. McKinley at the Convention made a deep impression on Mr. Hanna. The essential fabric of his own life consisted of personal relationships. He instinctively placed a higher value on loyalty than on any other moral quality. He could overlook almost any human failing, except

disloyalty. Erroneously or not, he considered that Mr. Foraker had been secretly hostile to the candidacy of Senator Sherman. He knew that Mr. McKinley had been scrupulously faithful under a peculiarly severe and unexpected personal temptation. In subsequent conversations about McKinley, he often referred with the utmost admiration to Mr. McKinley's refusal to consider the possible purchase of the highest American political honor by the desertion of the candidate to whom he was pledged even when that candidate had lost all chance of success. Thus the new political friendship was in a sense founded on the ruins of the old.

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The rupture with Mr. Foraker resulted, not merely in the creation of new friendships, but also in the creation of new enmities. He and the Governor, in ceasing to be friends, became active opponents. Thereafter the Republican party of Ohio was, until Mr. Hanna's death, divided into two factions. On Mr. Hanna's side were ranged the whole group of Republicans who had been interested in Senator Sherman's nomination. It contained Mr. Sherman himself, Mr. McKinley, Benjamin Butterworth, Charles Foster and Mark Hanna. On the other side, Mr. Foraker was the only Republican of ability and prominence. He was a proud, self-contained and self-confident man, whose nature it was to play a lone hand. He himself states that he never afterwards had a political ally, with whom he was as closely associated as he had been for a while with Mr. Hanna. It speaks well for his skill in political management that he should have been able to hold his own against such a combination of popularity, effective power and political ability as Mr. McKinley and Mr. Hanna eventually constituted.

There resulted one of the most extraordinary factional fights offered by the history of American politics. Its existence was notorious. There was great bitterness of feeling. The two factions frequently came to open blows in the primaries, in the state conventions and in the legislature. Yet it was rarely, if ever, carried so far as to imperil party success. From 1888 until 1904 the Republicans of Ohio were victorious with one exception, in all the state and national elections. In spite of charges and countercharges of treachery on election day, the two factions kept their fight on the whole within the party and presented

a sufficiently united front to the Democrats. Neither of them felt strong enough to push the disagreement to a finish and by risking a Democratic victory to endanger their own political plans as well as those of their adversaries. They subordinated their personal quarrels for the most part to Republican success. They spoke during the campaign from the same platforms, and they divided the offices. Nevertheless at almost every critical moment of Mr. Hanna's subsequent career he was embarrassed and at times almost defeated by the personal ill feelings consequent on his rupture with James B. Foraker.

CHAPTER XIII

POLITICAL FRIENDS AND ENEMIES

THE defeat in the Convention of 1888 of the presidential candidacy of John Sherman was a severe disappointment to Mark Hanna and a source of the utmost personal exasperation. He had labored long and well for a worthy and practicable political object only to fail at the last moment from an apparently unnecessary cause. The experience made a deep impression upon him. It constituted, as we have seen, the foundation of life-long political friendships and enmities. Thereafter his career in politics assumed, not a new direction, but a new emphasis, which proved to be salutary and edifying.

The idea of nominating and electing William McKinley to the presidency of the United States was born of those exasperat- · ing days at the Chicago Convention. There is no documentary proof of the truth of this statement, but his intimate friends date from this moment the conception of the idea, and the supposition is confirmed by a sufficient array of circumstantial corroboration. The circumstances and results of John Sherman's defeat both cleared the path for an exclusive devotion to the political advancement of William McKinley and made such an expenditure of his time and energy look eminently practicable.

Mark Hanna had made up his mind to nominate, if possible, a political leader from Ohio as the Republican candidate for the presidency. He was a man distinguished by great tenacity of purpose. The defeat of Sherman did not make him abandon the idea; but it taught him that John Sherman could never be the vehicle of its fulfilment. Thereafter that statesman had joined in Mr. Hanna's mind the majority of his fellow-countrymen in becoming a presidential impossibility. But the same series of exciting incidents which had extinguished the fires of Mr. Sherman's candidacy had unexpectedly made McKinley an obvious presidential possibility. A great name, a long and

eminent career and a lot of hard work had not availed to place Sherman much nearer the nomination than McKinley had been with no work at all and a comparatively modest career and reputation. The contrast and the lesson were obvious. They became a matter of frequent contemporary comment in the newspapers, and Mark Hanna had more reason than any one else to have them stamped on his mind.

Just at the moment when Sherman's star was paling and McKinley's waxed brighter, Mr. Hanna had broken the only personal tie in politics which might have interfered with an interest in McKinley's career. James B. Foraker was transformed from a friend into an opponent under conditions which, erroneously or not, persuaded Mr. Hanna to place a higher value on McKinley's friendship than on Mr. Foraker's. McKinley took the place both of Sherman and Foraker in the hierarchy of Mr. Hanna's political and personal relationships. He became both the intimate friend with a political future of great promise and the available presidential candidate. Thereafter the determination to make Mr. McKinley President of the United States and in the meantime to promote his political advancement in every possible way became Mark Hanna's dominant interest in politics.

The friendship between the two men had grown slowly and naturally. Whatever the occasion of their first meeting, they had become intimate very gradually. During the years of Mr. Hanna's association with Mr. Foraker, he and Mr. McKinley, although coming from the same part of the state, had a different set of political associates and different candidates for important state offices. I have quoted a letter of Mr. Hanna's to the Governor, in which he complains of what he considers the exorbitance of the "Major's" demands for recognition. But Mr. Hanna's increasing activity in politics brought them into more and more frequent relations, and it may be that before the Convention the process of substituting McKinley for Foraker as the most valued of Mr. Hanna's political friends had already made headway. The Governor and the Congressman were in some measure political rivals, because they were the two rising Republican leaders of Ohio whose careers might conflict; and in any event a strong interest in the political career of one of

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