For history fans and those interested in presidential bios, I just finished Troy Senik’s recent and well-reviewed biography A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland. Among the interesting things I learned:
1. He had a meteoric rise to the presidency, rivaling Grant’s. A hard working lawyer and former sheriff in Buffalo, NY, he served a one-year term as a reform-minded mayor of that city in 1882, two years as Governor of New York (1883-85) (tangling with state legislator Theodore Roosevelt), then his first term as U.S. president in 1885.
2. In his first campaign, his opponents used the slogan “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!” because as a younger man, Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child. Uncharacteristically for a politician, he admitted it and revealed he had always financially supported the child and the mother.
3. He was the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms, 1885-89 and 1893-97. In between those two terms, he lost to Benjamin Harrison although winning the popular vote. He’s the only president other than Jackson and FDR who has won the popular vote in three consecutive presidential elections. He also was the only Democratic elected to the highest office in the 51 years between the presidencies of James Buchanan (1857-61) and Woodrow Wilson (1913-21).
4. His presidencies were not marred by any wars, but by acrimonious fights over tariffs on foreign imports, the monetary gold standard, policies for Native Americans, and whether Hawaii should be granted territorial status. Cleveland’s inflexibility on matters of principle often left him unable to reach compromise on these issues, reducing his effectiveness.
5. He married Frances Folsom, the glamorous, much younger daughter of his deceased former law partner in the first ever White House wedding. She often stole the show when they traveled around the country.
6. During his second term, he was diagnosed with cancer of the mouth due to a long-time history of cigar smoking and tobacco chewing. The news was kept secret from the nation, and he even had a major operation for the condition on a boat outside the continental waters so news would not leak to the public.
7. He left the presidency disillusioned as the nation sank deeper into the economic depression that began in 1893. Nevertheless, he received praise from many quarters. Mark Twain said that Cleveland was “the greatest and purest American citizen” and “a very great president, a man who not only properly appreciated the dignity of his high office but added to its dignity.” After Cleveland’s death, President Taft said:
He was a great president, not because he was a great lawyer, not because he was a brilliant orator, not because he was a statesman of profound learning, but because he was a patriot with the highest sense of public duty; because he was a statesman of clear perceptions, of the utmost courage of his convictions, and of great plainness of speech; because he was a man of the highest character, a father and husband of the best type, and because throughout his political life he showed those rugged virtues of the public servant and citizen … .
No doubt due to his integrity, in a 1948 poll of historians Cleveland was ranked the eighth greatest president in U.S. history, between Theodore Roosevelt and John Adams.
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