Grover Cleveland

Grover Cleveland: The Honest Man's Deception

Over two days at the end of June 1893, a team of surgeons removed a malignant tumour, five teeth and part of the upper jaw from the President of the United States aboard a private yacht. The country was told he had a bad tooth. The most conspicuously honest politician of his generation had decided that the Panic of 1893 could not survive the news, and he lied about it for the rest of his life. The tumour is still on display at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia.

A Minister's Son with No College

Cleveland was born at Caldwell, New Jersey, on 18 March 1837, the fifth of nine children of the Reverend Richard Cleveland, a Yale-educated Presbyterian minister who never made any money. When his father died Grover was sixteen, and college went with him. He went instead to Buffalo, clerked in a law office, read the law by himself, and passed the bar examination at twenty-two in 1858 — an entire legal education assembled without a day of higher study.

During the Civil War he served as assistant district attorney for Erie County and, as his enemies never tired of repeating, "avoided military service in the war by hiring a substitute for $300."

Sheriff, Mayor, Governor in Eleven Years

He was sheriff of Erie County from 1870 to 1873, then returned to practice; by 1881 he had put aside some $75,000. That year the Buffalo Democratic Committee nominated him for mayor and he won unexpectedly. In office he made a speciality of exposing corruption and killing wasteful appropriations, and he acquired the reputation that carried him everywhere afterwards — honesty and hard work, a pragmatic reformer with a veto pen.

It took him one term to reach the governorship of New York, which he held from 1882 to 1884, running the same programme and taking on the Tammany Hall machine inside his own party. Two years later he was a presidential candidate.

The Scandal He Admitted

The 1884 campaign turned on the revelation that Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock with Maria Halpin in 1874. He did the thing nobody expected: he confronted the charges honestly, and the Miller Center notes that his supporters stayed with him. He won narrowly. In office he married Frances Folsom, his twenty-one-year-old ward, who became "the most popular first lady since Dolley Madison."

Out, and Back In

The 1888 campaign against Benjamin Harrison was, the Miller Center argues, "the beginning of a new era in campaign financing": the Republicans heavily outspent the Democrats. Cleveland took the popular vote and lost the Electoral College. Four years later, with Harrison having alienated his own party, Cleveland beat him and became the first president to serve non-consecutive terms.

The Yacht

He returned to the worst economic collapse the country had yet seen. Then, in June 1893, he mentioned discomfort in his jaw to his dentist, and an examination found a malignant growth on the roof of his mouth. His physician Joseph Bryant called it a "bad looking tenant" and said he would have it out at once if the mouth were his own.

On 30 June and 1 July, aboard the yacht *Oneida*, Bryant removed the tumour, five teeth and a section of the jaw. The team included William W. Keen, a pioneering brain surgeon; Robert Maitland O'Reilly, later Surgeon General of the United States; E. G. Janeway; John F. Erdmann; and Fred Hasbrook. The dentist Kasson Gibson fitted a hard rubber prosthesis so that the president could speak normally. The reason for the secrecy was economic: the Panic had already wrecked confidence, and Cleveland believed news of a cancerous president would finish it. The *Philadelphia Press* broke the story on 29 August 1893 and was denied. The truth was not admitted until 1917, when Keen finally published his account.

Depression, and Troops on the Rails

The depression deepened. Unemployment reached 18 per cent by 1894. Cleveland blamed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and forced its repeal, which "split the Democrats" and helped hand Congress to the Republicans in 1894. When the Pullman railway workers struck that year he "sent federal troops to crush the revolt and arrest its leaders," coming down unambiguously on the side of business. In foreign policy he took a bellicose line against Britain over the Venezuelan boundary, invoking the Monroe Doctrine. His second inaugural had stated the whole philosophy in a sentence: "It is a plain dictate of honesty and good government that public expenditures should be limited by public necessity."

Why Grover Is Called a Genius

Henry F. Graff, professor emeritus at Columbia University, opens with the flat sentence that has to be reckoned with: "Historians do not rank Grover Cleveland as a great President." Graff's diagnosis of why is specific and unkind. Cleveland's virtues — "hard working, honest, and independent" — were the virtues of a first-rate small-town mayor, and they did not scale to a national economic catastrophe. He "had no real vision for the future." Having never gone to college, he was "largely unfamiliar with the great ideas of history," and his instinct was command rather than leadership.

So the genius, if the word applies at all, is not intellectual. It is a genius of nerve: the willingness to be hated for a decision, repeatedly, in public. Cleveland admitted a paternity scandal in the middle of a presidential campaign rather than deny it. He used the veto more than any president before him — Graff credits that "record-breaking use of the presidential veto" with re-establishing the balance between the executive and Congress, and treats his readiness to call out federal troops as evidence of an emerging energetic executive. He forced the repeal of the silver act knowing it would split his own party, and it did.

The counter-case runs deeper than Graff's ranking. Cleveland's celebrated integrity had a large exception written into it: he concealed cancer surgery from the country for the rest of his life and let his officials deny a true newspaper report. His answer to the Pullman strike was soldiers. And his one clear idea in a depression — cut spending, defend the gold standard, reduce the tariff — was a theory of restraint applied to a crisis that was destroying farms and banks. He was brave, incorruptible and stubborn. Those are not the same as brilliant, and the sources do not pretend otherwise.

Legacy

Graff's verdict is that Cleveland's two presidencies form "an essential preface to the emergence of the modern presidency that began with Theodore Roosevelt" — the moment a weakened post-Civil War executive began pushing back against Congress, even if the man doing the pushing had no programme to push. He retired in 1897 to a large house in Princeton, New Jersey, "where he was treated like royalty by the town's inhabitants," became a trustee of Princeton University, sat on corporate boards, lectured, and in 1904 published *Presidential Problems*, a defence of his most contested decisions. He never finished the autobiography. He died at Princeton on 24 June 1908, of a gastro-intestinal illness complicated by heart and kidney disease. His last words were: "I have tried so hard to do right."