Grover Cleveland: The 22nd and 24th President
Can a president who lost reelection return to the White House for a nonconsecutive term? One man did just that. Wilfred McClay, professor of history at Hillsdale College, shares the remarkable life and career of Grover Cleveland.
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Script:
In 1881, Grover Cleveland was an obscure Buffalo, New York attorney. In 1885, he was President of the United States.
No one in public life has ever risen higher faster.
He did it, not by dint of a great fortune or great connections but by virtue of his virtue. He was a man of unassailable integrity–he did what he thought was right no matter the political cost.
In an era notorious for rampant corruption, Cleveland’s integrity drove his fellow politicians crazy—and made him a hero to voters. The proof? He won the popular vote in three consecutive presidential elections–a feat accomplished by only two other presidents: Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt.
Cleveland also won the Electoral College vote in the first and third of those elections, making him the twenty-second and twenty-fourth President of the United States.
Born on March 18, 1837, in Caldwell, New Jersey, Cleveland was the fifth of nine children. His father was a minister from a line of ministers, stretching back at least four generations.
But Cleveland took up the law, where his indefatigable work habits and attention to detail served him well.
By his mid-twenties, he had established himself as a leading attorney in Buffalo.
He was a workaholic, and he seems to have had little interest in marriage or family. He preferred to spend his free time visiting Buffalo taverns for beer and bratwurst.
It was in one such tavern that his political career began. There, Cleveland was dragooned by local Democratic power brokers into running for city mayor–a privilege better-connected prospects had already turned down. The mayor’s office was known to be a sinkhole of corruption. That, as it turned out, made it the right job for Cleveland.
In a matter of months, Cleveland took on the city’s entrenched interests, canceling bad contracts and cutting wasteful spending.
Could Cleveland take his “clean-up-the-city” act to the state level? Democratic Party leaders thought so. After only a year as Buffalo’s mayor, he was the Democrats’ candidate for governor of New York. Drawing voters from both parties, he won that election in a landslide.
He did for New York what he did for Buffalo: slashing budgets, vetoing pork barrel spending, and refusing to appoint machine lackeys to government positions.
What was left to conquer? Well, the Democrats hadn’t won a presidential election since 1856—almost three decades. Could Cleveland get them back to the White House?
The answer was yes: just like the voters of New York, the American people wanted someone to clean up Washington. But first, he had to get elected, and that wouldn’t be easy. The Republicans had uncovered a skeleton in Cleveland’s closet: a plausible allegation that he had fathered a child out of wedlock in Buffalo.
True to character, Cleveland never denied it. And much to the Republicans’ surprise, it actually strengthened Cleveland’s reputation—he would not lie.
Cleveland won the 1884 election, but just barely.
Fifteen months into his term, at age 49, he finally took a wife, marrying the daughter of his late law partner—the only president to marry in the White House.
Cleveland governed with the same unyielding integrity he had shown in Buffalo and Albany. He issued 414 vetoes, many of them for spending that he deemed unnecessary.
His fealty to the law was almost absolute. When white settlers agitated to break a treaty with the Winnebago and Crow Creek tribes in the Dakota territory, Cleveland said no.
Such principled positions, and the inflexible way he pursued them, did not help him when he ran for reelection in 1888. He failed to carry even his own state of New York, and lost to the Republican, Benjamin Harrison.
His wife, Frances, however, was confident they would return. She told the White House butler “Take good care of all the furniture… We are coming back four years from today.”
Four years later, in 1893, they did. The American people had missed Cleveland’s dedication to limited and honest government.
His moment of vindication, however, didn’t last long. When the railroad boom went bust and commodity prices collapsed, the Panic of 1893 was on. It was the worst economic depression in American history until the Great Depression of the 1930s.
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