CHAPTER XXVIII

CONCLUSION

A DISCRIMINATING estimate of Mark Hanna's public career must account, first of all, for the apparent disproportion between what he achieved and what he proposed or was equipped to achieve. He had no more training for public life than hundreds of other business men who dabbled in politics. His own will, strong as it was, and his abilities, exceptional as they were, account for only a certain portion of his success. To be sure, he willed and contrived the nomination of McKinley, just as he willed and contrived many other deeds which were of decisive importance in his career. But he did not plan his own political self-aggrandizement. Dominant as was his instinct for leadership, he never sought to concentrate in his own hands the various strings of his personal power. Throughout his career his effective influence gathered momentum from forces independent of its original source and of his own conscious purposes. Like a tropical bamboo, it derived much of its new growth from shoots which were rooted in fresh soil. Both he and his friends were amazed at his own triumphal progress; and they may well have been amazed, because his career was without precedent and is not likely to have any imitators.

Inasmuch as Mark Hanna was not a usurper and his career was not a tour de force, only one explanation will account for his peculiar success. He must have embodied in his own life and purposes some vital American social and economic tradition, which gave his personality, individual as it was, something more than an individual meaning and impulse; and he must have embodied this tradition all the more effectively because he was not more than half conscious of it. Mark Hanna could not represent anything unless he himself was what he represented. In truth, Mr. Hanna did embody the most vital

social and economie tradition in American history-the tradi tion, that is, of the pioneer. He was an incarnation of the spirit and methods of the men who seized and cleared the publie domain, developed its natural resources, started and organized an industrial and commercial system and determined most of our political and social habits and forms. All the salient characteristics of the pioneer are writ clear and large in Mr. Hanna's disposition and achievements. Indeed, they are, I believe, writ larger and clearer therein than in any other one accessible book. If Mark Hanna had not lived and tried and succeeded, something might have been permanently lacking in our understanding of the spirit and methods of the pioneer.

The foregoing assertions may well strike the average reader as doubtful. How can a man whose successful business career began after the Civil War and who did not become prominent in politics until 1896 - how can the life of such a man embody with particular success the spirit and methods of the men who conquered the American wilderness? During the culminating period of his life pioneering in its primitive sense had practically ceased. The wilderness had disappeared. The United States had become more like a European country than like the United States of 1830. The gulf which had been created between the America of 1830 and the America of 1900 would be fairly well measured by the gulf between the manner of life of the lean, hardy frontiersman and that of the affluent Cleveland merchant.

The difficulty is obvious, but it is not conclusive. The men who originate an economic and social impulse and start it off on a career of conquest do not bestow upon it a complete expression. They exhibit its fresh vigor, and they overcome the most serious obstacles in its path; but their expression of it is necessarily crude and partial. The completer revelation must wait on history and experience. Generations must pass before a national social and economic movement develops fully its own latent tendencies and capabilities. The primitive pioneers imposed their social, political and economic ideas upon the country, but by the time their ideas had become part of the national tradition, the conditions in which they originated had changed. After the Civil War the pioneer system had to meet

the shock of new economic and social forces. Under the stimulus of these new opportunities and new responsibilities it became in certain respects a new system. The vitality of the movement was depleted by the effort to adapt itself to more complicated social and economic surroundings, but this effort and its results proved to be peculiarly illuminating. Its strength and its weakness became more clearly distinguishable and more fully revealed than ever before, and the hand-writing of its history became far more legible. Inasmuch as only within the past fifteen years has the pioneer been granted his proper place in American economic and social development, it is not unnatural that during the same years there flourished and died the most complete single embodiment of pioneer purposes and methods.

The primary economic task of the pioneer was that of appropriating and developing the land and natural resources of a continent, a task which combined and confused individual and social profits. The combination and confusion was reflected in the human nature of the period. The early pioneer was an aggressive, energetic, hopeful, grasping individual. He worked and fought primarily for his own advantage, but his individualism did not prevent him from being the maker of a society. In an economic environment which provided opportunities for all, men could fight for themselves without cherishing ill-will or incurring it. As a matter of fact, the pioneer overflowed with good-will and good-fellowship. He and his neighbors were all striving for the same port. Their contests were merely a good-natured race for the quickest voyage and the biggest market.

From the beginning they recognized and acted on the theory that the individual and social profits were indistinguishable. They conceived it to be the business of their government, as the agent of social betterment, to assist them in attaining their personal ends. The public interest, which government was supposed to promote, was conceived chiefly as a collection of individual interests; and the way to promote it was to stimulate individual economic activity. Hence the passion for "public improvements" which possessed the pioneer states and their frequent inability, in making those improvements,

to distinguish between the really private and the really public interests involved. It was during these years, long before corporate enterprise had assumed economic importance, that "special interests" established their control over state legislatures. It was during these years that the practice of making American business depend on American politics had its beginning.

In the meantime American business was ceasing to be local and was becoming increasingly national in its operations. As it became national, the successors of the pioneers began to lose their suspicion of the Central Government. They began to understand that the nation could contribute more effectually to the stimulation of economic activity than could the states. Stephen Douglas, rather than a Whig, was the politician who first proposed to make land grants out of the Public Domain to a railroad. The Civil War accelerated the change. It split the Democratic party and converted the best of the pioneer Democrats into Republicans, who were ready to use the powers of the Central Government to redeem a national responsibility. Washington became the headquarters from which was directed a comprehensive scheme of state-aided business. The agricultural states obtained the gift of free land to homesteaders. The industrial states secured and kept, as their share of the bargain, among the several localities, a high protective tariff. Other interests were satisfied by free mines, timber and pasture. The railroads claimed land grants as their share of the spoil. Business of all kinds was encouraged by loose corporation laws. In return for all these privileges the various special interests were required only to make use of them. They named their own liquor and drank it when and where and how they pleased. Public and private interests were still conceived to be substantially identical, and the national economic interest a comprehensive collection of special interests.

This Republican economic policy, to the perpetuation of which the public career of Mark Hanna was devoted, is plainly the adaptation to new conditions of the earlier purposes and methods of the pioneer Democrats. The continuity of the tradition is unmistakable. It consisted fundamentally of an attempt to convert the spirit and methods of the pioneer from

an agency of local economic development into an agency of national economic development. The pioneer spirit and method, transformed in order to meet larger opportunities and responsibilities, was incorporated into the heart of the national economic system. In one way or another every kind of business was obtaining state aid, and was dependent upon state policy for its prosperity. At the very moment when both business and politics were being modified by specialization and organization, business itself was being fastened irretrievably to politics. And the association, dangerous as it is both for business and politics, lies deep and ineradicable in the American democratic tradition. Democracy has always meant to Ameri-j cans a political system which contributed, by whatever means, to their individual economic well-being. The pioneer economy, both in its local and national phases, was merely the first attempt to realize this purpose.

To the generation of business men who came to the front after the Civil War and grew up in the midst of this system, it seemed like the order of nature. It assuredly accomplished the purpose for which it was intended, and its success was so considerable that it was accepted as a matter of course by the dominant mass of opinion. Mr. Hanna himself and many others like him was as much of a pioneer in his own region of work as had been the men who with axe and gun pushed their way into the wilderness. He developed mines, discovered or created markets, built furnaces, improved mechanical processes, organized industries and started commercial currents on their course. He watched among his own people the gradual accumulation of social benefits which resulted from the stimulation of individual enterprise, and these benefits seemed to him, not the result of temporary conditions, but the normal and permanent effect of stimulating individual business energy. Neither he nor the men of his generation could understand why the system should not continue of equal benefit to the individual and to society.

Nevertheless, certain parts of this economic system were passing out of the pioneer stage, in which there was a rough approximation of individual and social benefits. The essential character of pioneer economics consisted of an abundance of