If political leaders are to preserve and restore the republic Cleveland served, they will need his fearlessness, and that foxy quality he never possessed.
Troy Senik’s new biography of Cleveland is an engaging and enjoyable journey through the life and career of our only president to serve nonconsecutive terms.
A merica’s Gilded Age was preoccupied with many of the same controversies as our own time. During the late 19th century, fierce political polarization, ethnoreligious tensions, a partisan journalistic corps, antitrust feeling, large-scale migration into the United States, trade policy disputes, and possibilities for U.S. intervention overseas were the concerns of the day — then as now. It was also an age made famous for its supposed political corruption. And yet arguably the most important U.S. president during the height of the Gilded Age was the personally incorruptible Grover Cleveland.
Troy Senik’s new biography of Cleveland, A Man of Iron, is a thoroughly engaging and enjoyable journey through the life and career of the ox-like man who became the only U.S. president to serve two nonconsecutive terms. The book is above all a character study, just as Senik intends it to be.
Born the fifth of nine children to a modest family in New Jersey, Grover Cleveland did not stand out as a child. His father — a Presbyterian minister — died when the boy was only 16, leaving Grover as the family’s chief breadwinner. The young man held a series of odd jobs before settling in to practice law with a respected firm in Buffalo, N.Y. As of summer 1881, Cleveland was an obscure 44-year-old bachelor who spent evenings after work drinking beer in the city’s German saloons. Four years later he was president of the United States.
What explains this astonishing electoral ascent? Not any superhuman political talent, charisma, or burning ambition on Cleveland’s part. Rather, each step of the way, by great good fortune, his character happened to align with the needs of key supporters. In October 1881, Buffalo’s Democratic Party operatives hoped to beat the odds by nominating an appealing candidate to run the city. Aware of Cleveland’s local reputation as a capable, honest, hard-working lawyer, they convinced him to run for mayor. In what would be the first in a pattern of similar elections, he won over just enough Republicans disgusted with business as usual and sailed into office.
As mayor of Buffalo, Grover Cleveland immediately made clear he would guard the public treasury carefully without favoring any interest group. As he put it, “we believe in the principle of economy of the people’s money, and that when a man in office lays out a dollar in extravagance, he acts immorally by the people.” Longtime politicos could hardly believe he meant it. This was no way to run a city! As a matter of fact, he did mean it and proceeded to govern accordingly, picking fights along the way.
Buffalo voters responded to Cleveland’s forthright, tight-fisted approach with hearty approval. He appeared to be a kind of watchdog for the public interest, and within months, he was mentioned as a possible candidate for state governor. Again, the argument was that in a state known for close contests, a candidate with a reputation for fiscal and personal integrity might be a vote-winner. It worked. Drafted to run for governor of New York, Cleveland defeated his Republican opponent, Charles Folger, in November 1882. He proceeded to govern the state exactly as he had governed Buffalo. Ignoring pressure from Tammany Hall, Cleveland kept a close eye on public expenditures, vetoing any he thought unnecessary and nudging forward modest good-government reforms.
Democrats nationwide began to wonder if this unusual man might be the one to win back the White House from Republicans. His proven cross-party appeal to GOP reformers was part of the case for his candidacy, as was his presumed ability to secure the swing state of New York for his party. At the Democratic National Convention of 1884, Cleveland was nominated for president. The resulting contest was ugly. Revelations that he fathered an illegitimate child years earlier nearly derailed his campaign. However, the scent of corruption surrounding his GOP opponent, James Blaine, left Republicans no less hobbled. Blaine was charming, intelligent, and politically astute, but GOP dissidents — known as Mugwumps — felt that Cleveland was clearly superior, and they bolted to him that fall. In the November election, Democrats held on to the Electoral College votes of the former Confederacy, adding New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Indiana, and key border states to their side of the list. In March 1885, Grover Cleveland was inaugurated as president.
Cleveland distrusted philosophical abstractions. But during his first administration, as well as his second, he governed intuitively according to a set of assumptions best described as classical liberalism. He was an instinctive noninterventionist on public-policy matters both foreign and domestic. Cleveland believed in limited government, constitutionalism, the rule of law, hard currency, and fiscal responsibility. He opposed U.S. territorial expansion overseas. He did not bother to cobble together coalitional support the usual way, by offering costly side payments to supportive constituencies, but said no to special favors for anyone and trusted that voters would appreciate the overall approach. Amazingly, they did, at least for a while. One characteristic Cleveland technique that Senik captures in his book is the presidential veto. Wielding his like a cudgel, Cleveland vetoed unwanted expenditures in the most unlikely places. Popular Civil War pensions, for example, were a special target of his ire.
After marrying the lovely young Frances Folsom in 1886 (becoming the only U.S. president to abandon bachelorhood while in office), Cleveland ran for reelection in 1888, choosing to emphasize tariff reduction as a fresh policy priority. His GOP opponent, Benjamin Harrison, ran a polished campaign pulling New York and Indiana back into the Republican column. Cleveland won a plurality of the popular vote nationwide but lost the Electoral College. At peace with the outcome, and proud of his tenure, he conceded the result and prepared to spend time fishing. But his wife had other ideas. As she readied to leave the White House in March 1889, Frances informed a member of the household staff: “I want you to take good care of all the furniture and ornaments in the house, and not let any of them get lost or broken, for I want to find everything, just as it is now, when we come back again.”
Frances was right. The Harrison administration and its congressional allies soon stumbled and overreached. Passing increased tariffs and spending an unusual amount of money, the so-called “Billion Dollar Congress” was firmly repudiated by the voters in the midterm elections of 1890. Democrats took back control of the U.S. House of Representatives by promising to leave Americans alone, and the way was paved for a Cleveland comeback. In February 1892, he gave an address at the University of Michigan, calling the audience back to the principles of the American founding. “You will be told that the people no longer have any desire for the things you profess,” he warned his listeners. “Be not deceived. The people are not dead but sleeping.”
Cleveland won his party’s nomination a third time that June and went on to defeat Harrison in November. Bettering his electoral triumph of eight years earlier, this was Cleveland’s most convincing win. And yet there were hints of profound discontent. Third-party Populists did well west of the Mississippi, tapping into farmers’ frustration with stagnant commodity prices, local railroad monopolies, drought conditions, and mounting debt. Calling for the nationalization of public utilities, Populists depicted the gold standard as a sinister international conspiracy designed to subjugate working Americans. The free coinage of silver was their solution.
Immediately on his second inauguration in March 1893, Cleveland’s political luck ran out. As one of the periodic financial panics of the era occurred, it quickly gave way to economic depression and labor unrest. Poorly understood at the time, the lack of a proper federal reserve was central. Cleveland, however, interpreted the real problem as one of lax currency. Determined to tighten up money supplies, he only made things worse. Voters and their representatives called for government intervention to help those hurt by hard times, but Cleveland refused. Now, the very uncompromising qualities that once appeared principled seemed obtuse instead.
Sticking to his traditional formula of hard money, limited government expenditure, and nonintervention, Cleveland alienated the public and divided his own party. Western and southern Democrats were increasingly drawn to the Populist stance in favor of free silver, and during the midterm elections of 1894, Republicans won back the House, promising responsiveness to voter concerns. By 1896, Cleveland’s unpopularity was so great that Democratic Party delegates that July gambled on a completely different course. After multiple rounds of balloting, they settled on a former congressman from Nebraska, William Jennings Bryan, as their nominee for president. A riveting speaker, Bryan captivated the delegates with his call for free silver. Fusing with willing third-party Populists, Bryan launched an unprecedented cross-country speaking campaign, calling for economic justice through a frontal assault on big-city banks and corporations.
Respectable East Coast elites in both parties were shocked by this series of developments. Viewing Bryan and his followers as little more than an angry mob, a young Theodore Roosevelt opined: “The sentiment now animating a large proportion of our people can only be suppressed, as the Commune in Paris was suppressed, by taking ten or a dozen of their leaders out . . . and shooting them dead.” TR’s perspective on the western populist phenomenon that year was by no means unusual. Northeast establishment types, including pro-gold Democrats breaking away from their party, warned that Bryan’s victory would mean the end of civilization. The Republican nominee, William McKinley of Ohio, was more measured in his statements, but the alternative was clear. McKinley and his party stood for sound money, protective tariffs, law and order, and a robust American nationalism cutting across lines of social class.
Even as Cleveland served out the end of his term, the Bryan campaign raised hell. Indebted farmers out West were enraptured by the boy wonder from Nebraska. But urban Catholic immigrants did not find his implied suggestion to burn down America’s leading metropolitan centers appealing. Big-city working-class laborers and prosperous midwestern townsmen were likewise not amused by his earnest promise of inflation. In the end, Grover Cleveland, like so many others, could not bring himself to vote for his own party’s nominee. And that November, McKinley’s American nationalism beat Bryan’s American populism in a landslide.
One of Troy Senik’s critics at the Wall Street Journal suggests that his biography is wrong to describe Cleveland’s presidency as very consequential. After all, it ended in political failure. Here, I find Senik’s argument more convincing. Readers, including 21st-century conservatives, will certainly disagree over what course Cleveland ought to have taken during his second term. But there can be no serious case that his choice was without consequence. Another president might have bobbed and weaved, accommodating the growing demand for government intervention in the economy. Cleveland did no such thing. He stood, as always, for the traditional American understanding of limited government. During the massive upheaval of the mid-1890s, he was the Dutch boy holding his finger in the dike. Paradoxically, this allowed his opponent William McKinley to inherit the presidency in 1897 without introducing revolutionary changes to that older form of government. Or to put it another way, in large part thanks to Cleveland, the growing demand for radical measures was stalled and defeated, through Bryan’s eventual loss.
This brings us back to Senik’s central theme of presidential character. Throughout his career, Grover Cleveland was utterly fearless. But as Senik fully admits, presidents are also politicians, and to be effective in that office requires political skills that Cleveland too often lacked. Successful presidents need to possess the cunning of a fox as well as the strength of a lion. That’s character, too. The lion scares off predators, while the fox avoids traps. Progressives argue that the long-term leftward transformation of this country is historically inevitable. Too many demoralized conservatives agree. If worthwhile political leaders in the coming years are to preserve and restore the republic Cleveland served, they will need his fearlessness, along with that foxy quality he never possessed. As he suggested: Be not deceived. The people are not dead but sleeping.