Grover Cleveland (1885-1889 & 1893-1897)
Born in a modest house in Caldwell, New Jersey on March 18, 1837, Stephen Grover Cleveland was the 22nd and 24th president of the United States, the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms. He was also the first Democratic president since the Civil War. A man committed to honesty, fairness, and non-partisanship, Cleveland was a popular president but often offended members of his own party. Cleveland began his political career in western New York and rose quickly from mayor of Buffalo in 1881 to president of the United States in 1885. Defeated by Republican Benjamin Harrison in 1888, he easily won reelection in 1892. The Democrats did not re-nominate him in 1896; ultimately, he owed his defeat to the deep Depression of 1893.
In 1841, Cleveland’s father moved to a church in Fayetteville, New York, where young Grover (he rarely used his first name) received his schooling. At the age of 13, he went to work to help family finances after his father became ill. He abandoned his hopes of attending college when his father died in 1853. He soon moved to Buffalo, where he worked briefly on his uncle’s farm before entering a local law firm as an apprentice clerk. In 1859, he passed the bar and opened his own law practice. He became a prominent lawyer and Democratic politician.
Elected mayor of Buffalo in 1881, he soon developed a reputation as a reformer because of his opposition to corruption and patronage. As governor of New York from 1883 to 1884, he exhibited bipartisan independence. He worked closely with Republican Assembly member Theodore Roosevelt to pass municipal reform legislation that gained him national recognition, but angered New York City's powerful Tammany Hall Democratic organization.
Cleveland managed to become the Democratic presidential nominee in 1884 without Tammany support. The campaign was contentious and close. Cleveland won the popular vote by just one-quarter of one percent, but the electoral votes gave him a majority of 219–182. His election as president required support from his own Democratic party and the reform wing of the Republicans. In office, he vetoed a proposal to give pensions to veterans for disabilities not caused by military service, a proposal backed by the Grand Army of the Republic, an influential veterans group. He offended the powerful railroads by his support for the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, the government’s first attempt at railroad regulation. He also made the railroad return millions of acres of western land that he then opened to homesteaders. He strongly supported the Civil Service Commission against the claims of Democratic office seekers. When told that his opposition to a high protective tariff might make it harder for him to be reelected, he characteristically said, “What’s the use of being elected or reelected unless you stand for something?”
Business opposition to his tariff policies played a role in his loss to Republican Benjamin Harrison in 1888. A popular chief executive, President Cleveland failed at his first attempt at reelection in 1888, but succeeded four years later. He won the popular vote in 1888, but lost in the Electoral College.
The public eagerly followed reports of his wedding to his 21 year-old ward in 1886 and the birth of their daughter Esther, both of which took place in the White House. Cleveland was a bachelor when he first became president. In 1886 at the age of 49, he married Frances Folsom in the White House. The newspapers avidly followed every detail of the wedding, as they did the birth of “Baby Ruth” in 1891 and Esther, born at the White House in 1893. Frances Cleveland was one of the most popular first ladies since Dolley Madison.
Cleveland went back to his law practice in 1889 and for the most part, he refrained from active participation in politics. With the approach of the 1892 election, he began to speak out against President Harrison’s passage of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which he saw as irresponsibly inflationary. Easily reelected in 1892, he soon had to deal with the Panic of 1893, the nation’s worst and longest depression to date, with many bankruptcies, bank failures, foreclosures, and unprecedented unemployment, second in its severity only to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Cleveland was firmly committed to basing the value of paper money in the United States on gold, which he saw as the only responsible measure to restore business confidence.
Cleveland also had to deal with serious conflicts between labor and industry, triggered by growing unemployment, falling wages, and long working hours. When violence erupted in a strike led by Eugene V. Debs against Chicago’s Pullman Palace Car Company, Cleveland generated bitter controversy by sending Federal troops to restore order. Eventually the government used claims of interference with interstate commerce and with delivery of the mail to end the strike and imprison Debs. Cleveland's actions were popular with many people but turned many Democrats against him.
Because he was unable to end it, President Cleveland became the scapegoat for the prolonged depression. Cleveland's conservative economic policies failed to end the depression and alienated many Democrats, especially in the South and West. In 1894 the Republicans won landslide victories in the congressional elections. Two years later, the Democratic convention repudiated Cleveland's administration and nominated silverite William Jennings Bryan, whom the Populists also endorsed. Bryan, a charismatic supporter of abandoning the gold standard, the “cross of gold” that he blamed for most of the nation’s problems, defeated Cleveland for the Democratic nomination in 1896, but lost to Republican William McKinley in the general election.
After leaving the White House for a second time, Cleveland retired to his home in Princeton, New Jersey in 1897.
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