Grover Cleveland received his early education at Clinton Liberal Academy.
College/University
Career
Gallery of Grover Cleveland
1860
United States
An early undated photograph of Grover Cleveland. Around 1860.
Gallery of Grover Cleveland
1885
United States
Cleveland's first Cabinet.
Front row, left to right: Thomas F. Bayard, Cleveland, Daniel Manning, Lucius Q. C. Lamar
Back row, left to right: William F. Vilas, William C. Whitney, William C. Endicott, Augustus H. Garland.
Gallery of Grover Cleveland
1887
1320 Monroe Dr NE, Atlanta, GA 30306, United States
Grover Cleveland (foreground) walks past the Georgia Building at the 1887 Piedmont Exposition, held in October at Atlanta's Piedmont Park.
Gallery of Grover Cleveland
1900
15 Hodge Rd, Princeton, NJ 08540, United States
Grover Cleveland seated in a chair, facing left, in his library at Westland Mansion, Princeton, New Jersey, United States.
Gallery of Grover Cleveland
1904
United States
Grover Cleveland and his son Richard.
Gallery of Grover Cleveland
1893
United States
Cleveland's last Cabinet.
Front row, left to right: Daniel S. Lamont, Richard Olney, Cleveland, John G. Carlisle, Judson Harmon
Back row, left to right: David R. Francis, William Lyne Wilson, Hilary A. Herbert, Julius S. Morton
Achievements
Statue of Grover Cleveland outside City Hall in Buffalo, New York
Cleveland's first Cabinet.
Front row, left to right: Thomas F. Bayard, Cleveland, Daniel Manning, Lucius Q. C. Lamar
Back row, left to right: William F. Vilas, William C. Whitney, William C. Endicott, Augustus H. Garland.
Cleveland's last Cabinet.
Front row, left to right: Daniel S. Lamont, Richard Olney, Cleveland, John G. Carlisle, Judson Harmon
Back row, left to right: David R. Francis, William Lyne Wilson, Hilary A. Herbert, Julius S. Morton
Stephen Grover Cleveland was the 22nd and 24th president of the United States and the only president ever to serve two discontinuous terms. His efforts to stem economic depression were unsuccessful, and the conservative means he used to settle internal industrial conflicts were unpopular.
Background
Ethnicity:
Cleveland was of English, Irish, and German ancestry.
Stephen Grover Cleveland was born on March 18, 1837, to Richard Falley Cleveland and Ann Neal Cleveland in Caldwell, New Jersey. His father was a Presbyterian minister. He had eight siblings. He grew up in poverty as his father's income was insufficient to provide for the large family.
Education
Grover Cleveland received his early education at Fayetteville Academy and Clinton Liberal Academy. Despite the early death of his father, a Presbyterian minister, and his consequent family responsibilities, Cleveland studied law in a respected Buffalo Rogers, Bowen, and Rogers Law Firm and gained admission to the New York bar in 1859.
Grover Cleveland was appointed an assistant district attorney for Erie County in 1863. Diligent and devoted, Cleveland set a good, though not brilliant, record. The enactment of the Conscription Act of 1863 caught him in the dilemma of whether to serve in the Army or find a substitute. To continue supporting his mother and sisters, he took the latter option, remaining in Buffalo to practice law.
Cleveland became sheriff in 1870, a post that promised large fees as well as frustrating experiences with graft and corruption. Although he was respected for his handling of official responsibilities, he made many enemies and won few admirers, for most citizens looked with disfavor on the office of sheriff. After 3 years he returned to legal practice, concentrating now on corporate law.
In 1881 Buffalo Democrats, certain that a reform candidate could sweep the mayoralty election, turned to Cleveland. In his one-year term as mayor, he stood for honesty and efficiency. New York State was alive with calls for reform in politics; a trustworthy candidate was much in demand. Elected governor by a handsome margin, Cleveland favored reform legislation and countered the interests of the New York-based political machine called Tammany Hall and its "boss," John Kelly, to such an extent that it caused a rift between them. After one term as governor, Cleveland was seen as a leading contender for the presidential nomination of 1884. His advantages lay in his having become identified with honesty and uprightness; also, he came from a state with many votes to cast, wealthy contributors, and a strong political organization. Pitted against Republican nominee James G. Blaine, Cleveland even won the support of reform-minded Republican dissidents known as Mugwumps. Several forces favored him: Tammany's eventual decision to support him in New York State, blamed for the depression of the 1880s falling on the Republicans, and temperance workers' ire with the Republican party. Thus, in 4 years, riding a crest of reform movements on municipal, state, and national levels, Cleveland moved from modest law practice in upstate New York to the president-elect.
Cleveland's victory margin in 1884 was slim. His Cabinet appointees were men of substance, though not of prominence: Thomas Bayard as secretary of state, Daniel Manning as secretary of the Treasury, and William Endicott as head of the War Department. All shared the conviction that government should be neither paternalistic nor favorable to any special group and that contesting economic groups should settle their differences without government intervention. With little administrative experience and few reasons to think highly of party organization, Cleveland in his first term advocated improved civil service procedures, reform of executive departments, curtailment of largesse in pensions to Civil War veterans, tariff reform, and ending coinage based on silver. He failed to stop silver coinage but achieved at least modest success in the other areas. In 1887 Cleveland took a strong position on tariff reform and later supported the passage of the Mills Bill of 1888. Although the Mills Bill provided for only moderate tariff reductions, it was viewed as a step in the right direction, a way of reducing the embarrassingly large annual government surpluses.
The Republicans mobilized to meet tariff reduction head-on, stopping the Mills Bill and substituting a protective tariff measure, going into the election of 1888 with the tariff as the key issue. Renominated for the presidency in 1888 without challenge, Democrat Cleveland was opposed by Republican Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, who had the support of businessmen and industrialists favoring protective tariffs. Superior Republican organization, Democratic party feuding, and election fraud lost the 1888 election for Cleveland, although he won a plurality of the popular vote. He moved back to New York to practice law and enjoy his family.
Out of office, Cleveland withdrew from politics for a year but then began again to behave like an interested candidate. Stirred into attacking the McKinley tariff of 1890 and taking a strong position against currency expansion through silver-based coinage, he gained the Democratic presidential nomination in 1892.
Cleveland's campaign against incumbent President Harrison was a quiet one, with the Democrats aided by the 1892 Homestead strike, in which prominent Republicans were involved in the effort to break labor power and to maintain special benefits for the powerful steel magnates. The Democrats scored smashing victories in 1892, not only electing Cleveland but winning control of both House and Senate.
To his second Cabinet, Cleveland named Walter Gresham as secretary of state, John G. Carlisle as Secretary of the Treasury, Daniel S. Lamont as head of the War Department, and Richard Olney as attorney general. Like Cleveland's earlier Cabinet, these men agreed on extreme conservatism in handling economic issues. It was to Carlisle, Lamont, and Olney that Cleveland listened most closely, although in the final analysis, he made his own decisions.
Cleveland had scarcely taken his oath of office when the worst financial panic in years broke across the country. The Panic of 1892-1893 had its roots in over expansion of United States industry, particularly railroad interests; in the long-term agricultural depression that reached back to the 1880s; and in the withdrawal of European capital from America as a result of hard times overseas. As the panic broadened into depression, the American public tended to focus the debate about its cause and cure on one item: the money question. On one side the argument was that businessmen (alarmed by the Sherman Silver Purchase Act requiring a purchase of silver each month) had lost confidence in the monetary system and feared depletion of the gold reserves; to regain their confidence and a return to prosperity, the buying of silver by the Federal government had to be halted. On the opposite side of the argument, silver exponents maintained that what was needed was more money in circulation, which could be achieved only if more, not less, silver was purchased by the government and used as a basis for coinage.
Cleveland, long afraid of silver as a threat to economic stability, determined that repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act would stem the drain of gold reserves and end the depression by restoring confidence to businessmen; he called a special session of Congress for its repeal. The Democratic party divided along sectional lines, with western and southern Democrats standing against repeal. The repeal, however, was voted, but it was ineffective, and gold reserves continued to dwindle. Meanwhile, the depression became worse during 1893 and 1894.
Wounds that had opened during the silver-repeal debate were not healed when Cleveland's administration turned to the long-promised issue of tariff reform. Cleveland had been identified for many years with a downward revision of tariffs and more equitable distributions. Pressured by sectional interests, the Democrats in Congress were more divided than united over tariff legislation. In addition, the silver battle had virtually torn the party in half, leaving many Democrats with nothing but hatred for the President. The Wilson bill, from the viewpoint of the President, a fairly satisfactory measure for tariff reduction, was amended almost beyond recognition as it passed through the Senate, emerging with tariff rates only slightly lower than previous ones and carrying a host of provisions for special-interest groups. Highly dissatisfied but unsuccessful in his attempts to improve it, Cleveland allowed the Wilson-Gorman Act to become law without his signature.
Distrusted now and detested, Cleveland was convincingly repudiated by the Democratic Convention of 1896, which nominated William Jennings Bryan on a platform demanding free and unlimited coinage of both silver and gold at the rate of 16 to 1. Cleveland took no role in the campaign. He retired to Princeton, New Jersey, as soon as his term ended. He occupied himself with writing, occasional legal consultation, the affairs of Princeton University, and very occasional public speaking, but after 1900 he became less reluctant to appear in public. Sympathetic crowds greeted his appearances as the conservative Democratic forces with which he had been identified took party leadership from William Jennings Bryan. Briefly stirred into activity in 1904 to support Alton B. Parker's candidacy for the presidency, Cleveland spent most of his retirement years outside political battles, increasingly honored as a statesman. After offering to assist President Theodore Roosevelt in an investigation of the anthracite coal strike of 1902, he was active in the reorganization of the affairs of the Equitable Life Assurance Society in 1905.
Cleveland was the son of a Presbyterian minister, but he seems not to have been especially religious himself. He was quite tolerant of other religions, with the exception of Mormonism, but even there his real objection seems to have been to polygamy rather than the religion itself.
Politics
Cleveland joined the Democratic party, acting as ward delegate and ward supervisor. Grover Cleveland's political career developed while the wounds of the Civil War and Reconstruction were healing and just as the serious social and economic problems attendant upon industrialization and urbanization were unclearly emerging. Although a lifelong Democrat, Cleveland was not skilled in party politics; he had emerged from a reform wing of his party and had only a few years of public experience before becoming president. Interested in public issues, he used the presidency to try to shape legislation and public opinion in domestic areas. Yet, by his second term of office, the old, familiar debates over tariffs and currency had been called into question and traditional political alignments began to tear apart. Cleveland, however, was not sensitive to the problems of party harmony; instead, he stood on principle at the price of party unity and personal repudiation. In the depression of the 1890s, his concern for the flow of gold from the Treasury led him to force Congress to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, and this action caused the division of the Democratic party. The depression worsened, and by his intervention in the Pullman strike of 1894, he alienated the laboring class, thus losing all effectiveness as president. In 1896 Cleveland was rejected by his party.
Views
Cleveland favored reform legislation and countered the interests of the New York-based political machine called Tammany Hall and its "boss," John Kelly, to such an extent that it caused a rift between them.
To avert what he viewed as a financial disaster, Cleveland became involved with four bond issues to draw gold into the Treasury. Not only was this effort to maintain gold reserves unsuccessfully, but Cleveland was charged with having catered to Wall Street millionaires when other governmental policies had failed.
Beset by currency and tariff failures and hated by a large segment of the general population and by many in his own party, Cleveland further suffered the loss of prestige by his actions in the Pullman strike of 1894. Convinced that the strike of the American Railway Union under Eugene V. Debs against the Pullman Company constituted an intolerable threat to law and order and that local authorities were unwilling to take action, Cleveland and Olney sent Federal troops to Chicago and sought to have Debs and his associates imprisoned. Although Cleveland prevailed and order was enforced, laborers throughout the country were angered by this use of Federal force.
Quotations:
"A government for the people must depend for its success on the intelligence, the morality, the justice, and the interest of the people themselves."
"A truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil."
"After an existence of nearly 20 years of almost innocuous desuetude, these laws are brought forth."
"Communism is a hateful thing, and a menace to peace and organized government."
"He mocks the people who propose that the government shall protect the rich and that they, in turn, will care for the laboring poor."
"Honor lies in honest toil."
"I have considered the pension list of the republic a roll of honor."
"I have tried so hard to do right."
"I know there is a Supreme Being who rules the affairs of men and whose goodness and mercy have always followed the American people, and I know He will not turn from us now if we humbly and reverently seek His powerful aid."
"I would rather the man who presents something for my consideration subject me to a zephyr of truth and a gentle breeze of responsibility rather than blow me down with a curtain of hot wind."
"In the scheme of our national government, the presidency is preeminently the people's office."
"It is better to be defeated standing for a high principle than to run by committing subterfuge."
Personality
In Stephen's Pulitzer-prize winning biography, Allan Nevins observed that Cleveland had a dual personality. "To the end of his life," wrote Nevins, "his intimates were struck by the gulf which separated the exuberant, jovial Cleveland of occasional hours of carefree banter, and the stern, unbending Cleveland of work and responsibility, whose life seemed hung round by a pall of duty." He had a quick temper and spoke bluntly.
Physical Characteristics:
A massive, hulking figure, at 250 pounds the heaviest president up to that time, Cleveland stood 5 feet 11 inches tall and had a great bull neck, strong jaw, double chin, and ham-like fists. His hair, quite thin by middle age, was brown, his eyes blue, and his complexion fair. He wore a great bushy mustache. He spoke crisply in a strong resonant voice. His health generally was sound. In 1893, at the beginning of his second term as president, a malignant tumor was discovered in his mouth. In a secret hour-long operation performed aboard a yacht owned by Commodore E.C. Benedict as it cruised the East River off Manhattan, a team of doctors led by Dr. Joseph Bryant removed the president’s left upper jaw and part of his palate and fitted him with a vulcanized rubber prosthesis that retained the natural contour of his jawline. In this operation and in a second one performed to remove suspicious tissue nearby, all surgery was done from within the mouth to avoid an external scar. The cancer never recurred. Although speculation that Cleveland was seriously ill arose in the press, the White House categorically denied it. The operation remained a secret until 1917, when Dr. W.W. Keen, one of the physicians present, described it in detail for the Saturday Evening Post.
Quotes from others about the person
"Four Good Reasons for Electing Cleveland: 1. He is honest. 2. He is honest. 3. He is honest. 4. He is honest." - Newspaper editorial endorsing Cleveland, as quoted at "Postcards From America"
"Democracies must have leaders who are the people's prophets and who act as their mentors. A prophet must see ahead and turn the people's minds to the future. A mentor Cleveland was - a stern and determined one. A prophet he was not." - Rexford Guy Tugwell in Grover Cleveland
"Grover Cleveland declined to participate in character attacks on Blaine. When presented with papers which purported to be extremely damaging to Blaine, he grabbed them, tore them up, flung the shreds into the fire, and decreed, "The other side can have a monopoly of all the dirt in this campaign." - H. Paul Jeffers in An Honest President
Interests
fishing, hunting
Connections
On June 2, 1886, Cleveland married Frances Folsom in the Blue Room at the White House. The Clevelands had five children: Esther, Ruth, Marion, Richard Folsom, and Francis.