Excerpt from Marcus Alonzo Hanna: His Life and Work The preparation of the material upon which the following account of Marcus Alonzo Hanna's life and work is based was attended with many difficulties. No political leader of similar prominence in modern times has left such a slim public record of his characteristic achievements. He began his career as a political manager whose work consisted, not in the advocacy of legislative policies or in acts of public administration, but in political planning and negotiation, which only incidentally became a matter of public record. Throughout his career this aspect of his work remained of decisive importance. To give a full and accurate account of such plans and negotiations is almost an impossibility, and it is impossible, not merely because many of these negotiations were essentially confidential, but because subsequent accounts of them, even when given in good faith, can scarcely avoid some inaccuracy and partiality. Mr. Hanna's correspondence also throws comparatively little light upon the critical decisions and moments of his career. The really decisive negotiations were never committed to paper, and Mr. Hanna did not keep copies of many of the most important letters which he wrote and received. In order to supplement the necessary scarcity of documentary material bearing on Mr. Hanna's life and work, all of his political and business associates were asked to contribute full and careful statements covering those phases of his career with which they were familiar. The task of taking these statements was confided to Mr. James B. Morrow, who had been for many years editor of the Cleveland Leader, and who brought to the work unusually high qualifications. Not only had he long been personally acquainted with Mr. Hanna and familiar with the unwritten political history of the period, but he had an unusually accurate knowledge of the complications and personalities of Ohio politics. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.