Cleveland, Grover

Cleveland, Grover (1837–1908), twenty‐second and twenty‐fourth president of the United States.Born in Caldwell, New Jersey, Cleveland spent most of his early life in Buffalo, New York, where he practiced law and held minor offices. (He also fathered a child out of wedlock, an indiscretion that his political opponents would later use against him.) In 1881, running as a Democrat, he won election as mayor of Buffalo. The following year he was elected governor of New York, establishing in both positions a reputation for honesty and courage. Elected president in 1884, narrowly defeating James G. Blaine, he became the first Democrat to serve in that office since the Civil War. As president, he worked for civil service reform and tariff reform. Seeking to restrain governmental expansion, he vetoed over two‐thirds of the bills passed by Congress, more than all his predecessors combined.

Losing a close reelection race to the Republican Benjamin Harrison in 1888, Cleveland returned to his legal practice. He regained the presidency in 1892, defeating Harrison and the Populist party candidate James B. Weaver, thereby becoming the only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms. In response to a devastating depression that began in 1893, Cleveland persuaded Congress to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, which he believed undermined the government's economic stability. In 1894, he vetoed a compromise silver measure, led an inept attempt at tariff reform, and sent federal troops to Illinois to put down the Pullman railroad strike. Leaving office under a cloud of unpopularity, he retired to Princeton, New Jersey, where he died in 1908.

Cleveland's stature rose posthumously, boosted in 1932 by Allan Nevins's Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage, which praised his honesty and forthrightness. While historians in 1948 and 1962 ranked him “near great,” subsequent scholarly assessments, dwelling on his ineffective handling of the crises of the 1890s, placed him in the “average” category.

If not a great president, Cleveland was nonetheless an important one. In initiatives like the repeal of the Tenure of Office Act in 1887 (an act, passed in 1867, that prohibited a president from removing appointed officials without the approval of the Senate), his brisk use of the veto power, reforms in federal land and Indian policy, and efforts at tariff reform, he recaptured for the presidency some of the powers it had lost during Reconstruction. Although not closely involved with its passage, Cleveland signed into law the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, a pioneering federal regulatory measure. Establishing important precedents, he used a sweeping court injunction to end the Pullman strike and sent federal troops to Illinois without a request from the governor. Cleveland also asserted presidential authority in foreign policy, giving it a moral dimension akin to Woodrow Wilson's. He tried unsuccessfully to reverse the 1893 revolution that overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy, citing wrongful involvement by U.S. officials and business interests in Hawai'i. In settling an 1895 border dispute between Great Britain and Venezuela, he gave the Monroe Doctrine additional force in U.S. foreign policy.

Cleveland, however, showed little understanding of the large forces of industrialization and urbanization unfolding in the late nineteenth century. Following the Democratic philosophy of states' rights and limited government, he devoted himself principally to maintaining the gold standard. His actions during the depression of the 1890s split the Democratic party, heightened the influence of its agrarian wing, and strengthened the Republican party.
See also Depressions, Economic; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Latin America; Free Silver Movement; Gilded Age; Monetary Policy, Federal; Populist Era; Pullman Strike and Boycott.

Bibliography

Robert McElroy , Grover Cleveland: The Man and the Statesman, 2 vols., 1923.
Horace Samuel Merrill , Bourbon Leader: Grover Cleveland and the Democratic Party, 1957.
J. Rogers Hollingsworth , The Whirligig of Politics: The Democracy of Cleveland and Bryan, 1963.
Rexford G. Tugwell , Grover Cleveland, 1968.
H. Wayne Morgan , From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877–1896, 1969.
John F. Marszalek, ed., Grover Cleveland: A Bibliography, 1988.
Richard E. Welch Jr. , The Presidencies of Grover Cleveland, 1988.

R. Hal Williams