 From his house on North Market Street in Canton , McKinley ran his campaign , with telephone and telegraph at his disposal . Hanna was busy meeting with executives to extract funds , and delegated much of the day @-@ to @-@ day policymaking to others , most prominently Dawes , who was a member of the campaign executive committee and was responsible for distributing much of the money that Hanna raised . Payne was nominally in charge of the Chicago office , but Dawes , a member of the McKinley inner circle , had more influence . Pamphlets were sent from Chicago in carload lots across the country . The campaign spent almost $ 500 @,@ 000 on printing alone , which Stanley Jones , in his account of the 1896 campaign , estimated paid for hundreds of millions of pamphlets . The campaign paid for hundreds of speakers to stump on McKinley 's behalf . Efforts were made to keep expenses down ; Dawes insisted on competitive bidding , and most of his top @-@ level hires were business associates , not political operatives . Others prominent in the Chicago office included Charles Dick , the secretary of the organization and later a senator . 
