Grover Cleveland. As a kid, his always seemed like a silly name, with a muppet’s first name and a city for his last name.
Grover Cleveland. He didn’t have the stature of Washington, Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt, the thirst for fame like Theodore Roosevelt, or the notoriety of a Jackson or a Nixon.
Grover Cleveland. His name settled into me more recently when I would pass the Grover Cleveland service area on I-95 in New Jersey. Then I learned that, fun fact, he was the only President to serve two non-consecutive terms.
Wait, what?
I held on to that fact, lingering on it long enough that Cleveland moved near the top of my reading list. Who was this man? How, even why, did he get elected non-consecutively? Knowing when he presided over in American history, what role did he play in shaping that history?
It turns out that there is a lot to like about Grover Cleveland, at least within the context of his times. He was first, a reformer, and clashed with his own party as well as the opposition on many issues of the day. He was the first Democrat elected to the Presidency since the Civil War, and he had previously been elected Sheriff, Mayor, and Governor in respective jurisdictions around Buffalo, New York.
Grover Cleveland’s presidencies took place during a time of tremendous change in the United States, bridging the third and fourth periods of American presidential history. His first term saw the end of the period marked by the Civil War and Reconstruction; his second term was at the start of the gilded age, when industrialization rapidly changed the socio-economic landscape, and issues of currency and tariffs dominated.
Most of my reading is based on “Grover Cleveland”, a biography by Allan Nevins. One interesting note about reading this biography is that it was first published in 1933. The book was therefore written within living memory of the Cleveland administration, and was itself over 85 years old by the time I read it. I bought it used, through Amazon, and it turned up marked as the former property of the State Teachers College in Brockport, New York – fitting for a New Yorker reading about a New York politician.
A Brief History
Born in Caldwell, New Jersey, Cleveland’s family moved to Oneida County, New York, where Cleveland came of age. His father was a Presbyterian pastor, and later in life took a position in Utica. The family grew up on the poor side of middle class, and much of Cleveland’s pre-political career was spent as a bachelor lawyer, supporting his mother and sisters as he built a law practice in Buffalo.
After a term as Sheriff, Cleveland was in the party system. Grover Cleveland was Mayor of Buffalo, Governor of New York, and then President of the United States, all in rather rapid succession. He was the first Democrat elected to the Presidency since before the Civil War, and he had a reputation as a more-or-less practical-minded, if sometimes stubborn, attorney.
Prior to the Presidency, Cleveland clashed vigorously with New York City and other downstate Democratic power bases, but he had built up enough of a base upstate between business supporters and “Mugwumps”, Republicans who were more aligned with the center-right, pro-business policies that Cleveland supported. Cleveland would clash with Tammany Hall throughout his national political career.
First Term
His first term was broadly successful. He came in as a reformer, a Democrat and man of the people, taking on corrupt establishment Republicans. By this point in American history, the Republicans had dominated politics for over twenty years, and of three key issues, Republicans were largely in conflict with Cleveland over two of them.
First was the “spoils” system of rewarding political loyalists with government jobs. This was considered by many to be a corrupt practice, rewarding important and lucrative government posts to people whose sole quality was that they supported the winning candidate’s campaign. Cleveland swung hard in the opposite direction, perhaps too hard, taking months to fully vet candidates for each position, and pretty much flatly turning down anyone who asked him for a job. Eventually he relented, delegating choices of lower level posts to people he had previously selected, but his rectitude on the issue was a credit to his character.
A second issue was one of tariffs. Republicans, who were generally the party of big business, supported tariffs to protect American industry. Cleveland, however, while a supporter of business, was a bit of a libertarian, and saw how tariffs protected big business not only from foreign competition, but domestic competition that would otherwise compete against the near-monopoly power of big business. He came close to enacting tariff reform, but a bill that he fought through hell and high water for failed to pass before the next Presidential term; both chambers of Congress passed bills but failed to reconcile them.
The third key issue was “free silver”, an issue which would entangle Cleveland and the American political system for over a decade. The short version is that farmers in the south and miners in the west favored the government minting as much silver into currency as possible, which would inflate the currency. At one end of the spectrum, US dollars would be backed by both silver and gold. Cleveland, most Republicans, and a handful of pro-business Democrats, opposed free silver, and fought to keep the US on the gold standard, and to mint less silver, or at least no more than was already being minted.
In addition to these three issues, which I’d summarize as “win – draw – loss” on Cleveland’s record, Cleveland also got some funding to modernize the Navy, and kept American adventurism leashed in dealings overseas. Under his administration, the US settled some important disputes with the British. He also reversed a late-term giveaway of Native American land by his predecessor, Chester A. Arthur.
Cleveland also rolled back Federal efforts at Reconstruction, and supported some Southern Democrats for positions in his administration. In context, it’s important to remember that by this point, a full generation after the Civil War had ended, many Americans, including Northerners, felt Reconstruction to be a failed policy and a waste of resource – just let them (the South) get back to taking care of themselves, was the preferred response. Cleveland was also in favor of less government, not more, and so putting the weight of the Federal thumb on the South was not something he was in favor of. In modern times, this seems like an abandonment of Federal support for civil rights in the South. It was, but it was also a political issue that spanned multiple Presidents, and in my opinion speaks more to the populace than any one President.
He also got married! Imagine that, a man elected to such high office who wasn’t married already. Prior to his marriage, Cleveland’s sister acted as hostess at White House events. He married Frances Folsom, a young woman less than half his age, the daughter of a friend.
Second Term
A curious quote from First Lady Frances Cleveland, as they left the White House, directed a staff member to take good care of all home furnishings. “We are coming back four years from today,” she said. She was right.
Cleveland had lost the election to Benjamin Harrison, grandson of previous President William Henry Harrison, in an election that largely turned on Republican support for tariffs.
Between terms, Cleveland kept something of a low profile. He kept an office at a New York City law firm and vacationed often near Buzzards Bay, fishing and enjoying his time out of the spotlight. However, when his successor, Benjamin Harrison, and future successor, a Senator named William McKinley, passed both pro-tariff and pro-silver bills (The McKinley Tariff and the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, respectively), Cleveland was moved to write a public letter protesting free silver, putting his name back in the limelight, and eventually leading to a second run for the Presidency.
In that election, Cleveland first won the Democratic nomination by outmaneuvering his opponent and taking on a pro-silver Vice Presidential candidate. In the campaign, a rematch against his opponent from the previous election, Cleveland benefitted from public sentiment turning against tariffs, a split Western vote between Republicans and Populists, and Harrison’s lack of personal campaigning; his wife was dying of tuberculosis and passed away just two weeks before the election.
Some of the issues Cleveland had previously fought against caused, in part, the long-term economic problems that plagued his second term. Almost immediately after taking office, the Panic of 1893 hit, and a lack of gold, due to the Silver Purchase Act, prolonged government inaction until the act was repealed. Tariffs were slightly reformed, against great opposition from a variety of interests, notably the Sugar Trust. Cleveland signed a watered down tariff reform bill.
Also in 1893, Cleveland was diagnosed with a cancerous growth in his mouth; it’s debatable whether and to what degree it was malignant. To remove the cancer, oral surgery was secretly performed between Congressional sessions aboard the yacht of his good friend Elias Cornelius (“E.C.”) Benedict, and his subsequent speech impediment and disfigurement explained as the effects of tooth surgery; later prosthetics addressed these issues. Fun fact: the yacht at the time was named the Oneida.
The Panic of 1893 brought labor unrest. While there were widespread uprisings, the most famous would be the Pullman Strike. This is one of the seminal events in American labor history, prompted by workers for the Pullman company, a maker of rail cars, cutting wages for its workers without lowering the rents they paid in company towns, and without their corporate chief taking a pay cut. Cleveland’s administration fought the strikers in court, but when the strikers persisted, Federal troops were sent in to Chicago, and over two dozen strikers were killed. Across the nation, smaller uprisings in solidarity resulted in various acts of violence as well.
Nevins defends Cleveland by more-or-less throwing the decision under Cleveland’s attorney general, Richard Olney, and emphasizes Cleveland’s legal reasoning – essentially that railroads were an important conduit for commerce and carriers of US Mail, which was not to be interfered with. Olney had been a railroad attorney and, notably, still received a retainer from a railroad company, one that exceeded his government salary.
On the labor side, labor leaders were divided over whether to strike in the first place. Black Americans were sent in as strikebreakers, motivated against the racism of the American Railroad Union, and in the aftermath, Eugene V. Debs, until now merely a labor leader, committed to socialism, and would figure prominently on the left side of American politics for decades to come.
It’s easy to fault Cleveland for over-reacting to the Pullman strike. At the time, his actions were generally favored, and most Americans opposed the strikers. A subsequent commission formed by the Cleveland administration found the Pullman company partly to blame and described the company town operations as “Un-American”; the Pullman Company was later ordered to divest its ownership in the towns. In 1894, Cleveland and Congress designated Labor Day as a Federal holiday.
Notably, just prior to Cleveland re-taking office, American businessmen had backed a revolution in the sovereign nation of Hawaii, and sought annexation by the United States. The Harrison administration supported this move, but Cleveland sent a Congressman (James H. Blount) to investigate, and Blount’s report stated that the actual citizens there did not want to be annexed. Unfortunately, the Queen of Hawaii took a hardline stance against her opponents, and when Cleveland referred the matter to Congress, they instead opted to establish relations with the Republic of Hawaii, i.e. the business-backed government.
In the election of 1896, the silver issue split the party. Cleveland ran again for the Presidency, as at that time there was no formal limit on the number of terms a President could serve. However, the populist branch gained considerable power within the party, and nominated William Jennings Bryan as their candidate following his famous, “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic National Convention.
Bryan lost to McKinley; despite his broad rural popularity, he wound up being a one-issue candidate, and Republicans were able to mobilize support in the industrial east and urban centers to defeat him.
Cleveland retired from public life, serving on various boards, and writing magazine articles; in one case unfortunately taking a position against women’s suffrage, saying, “ . . .responsible women do not want to vote.” He passed away in 1908.
Assessing Grover Cleveland
I came to like Cleveland very much as a politician and as a President. His stance on reforming public service, his position on tariffs, and even his support for the Gold Standard, however debatable that might have been as a policy, were all sensible and necessary in their time. His administration’s actions in the Pullman Strike were regrettable; according to Nevins, that was less Cleveland’s doing than the decisions of his administration, but all the same, the buck famously stops at the President’s desk. Cleveland’s unique non-consecutive terms as President place him well for assessing American politics with respect to how much a President is beholden to his times.
Cleveland’s first term was quite a bit more successful than his second term. The country was beginning to bloom again, a generation after the Civil War, and great promise beckoned. Cleveland’s approach of fixing what was broken (the spoils system, tariffs) in order to set a proper foundation was sensible and mostly successful. Breaking the Republican hold on national politics made the system competitive again. While the Republican Party’s factionalism began to devour itself, Cleveland brought needed renewal to the political system.
His second term was, unfortunately, hobbled from the start by a financial panic, one arguably caused in part by his predecessor, Benjamin Harrison, and the Senator who would be his successor, William McKinley. Hard, swift choices were required, and required Congress to act as well. The hard times and the political positions that formed around them made Cleveland’s second term less forgiving. Not only was Cleveland confronted with opposition from the Republicans, but he also faced mounting opposition from the populists in his own Democratic Party.
Could Cleveland be elected President today? Until recently I would have said yes. While the two major parties have re-aligned themselves considerably in the decades since, the parties, then as now, were fundamentally built around Republicans being the party of big business and finance, with the Democrats being the party of agrarians and the working class. Yet there were Republicans who would caucus with Democrats over specific issues that split their parties, and the reverse. Cleveland was a Democrat who could bring in enough “Mugwump” Republicans to make up for losing support from urban Democratic machines; he was a bipartisan centrist.
However, in recent years (as I write this in 2019) the parties are re-aligning once again. Now, as then, a progressive wing is developing in the Democratic Party that is as firmly against business-friendly Democrats such as Cleveland would be, as they are against Republicans in general. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has also developed a progressive anti-fatcat faction that is disrupting traditional Republican positions on foreign policy and trade, even as they support a supposed fatcat as President.
Cleveland’s libertarian approach to government and light foreign policy would play well today, but his positions on tariffs, economics (probably more about the Fed than the Gold Standard today) and labor would be challenged by factions in both parties. In an era where staunchly supporting a position seems to fare better than “reaching across the aisle”, Cleveland might do well. It would really depend on where the constituency fell on the specific issues.
Grover Cleveland succeeded in large part because he stuck to his guns, so to speak. In a world where politicians are often derided as changing their opinions with the polls, or with their parties, Cleveland was willing to buck his party and find new coalitions to at least try and execute his agenda. He succeeded in some respects, failed in others, but his integrity was never in question (except, of course in the matter of a young woman who supposedly bore his child out of wedlock). In that respect, Cleveland today would be on point as a potentially divisive figure in either party. Given how much rancor exists within both parties today, I have no doubt that a modern Cleveland, should he emerge, would go quite far in the road to the White House.