Hayes Historical Journal: Grover Cleveland - Another Look

Grover Cleveland — Another Look

By VINCENT P. DESANTIS 

Volume III, Number 1, 2
Spring, 1980, Fall, 1980

Grover Cleveland is generally rated by American historians as one of America’s greatest Presidents and the country’s ablest and most important President between Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Not all historians and not all of Cleveland’s own contemporaries however, would agree with this assessment of his presidency. 

According to Thomas A. Bailey, in his study of Presidential greatness, Cleveland, “By most meaningful tests...was not an outstanding President.” And “if he was the ablest President between Lincoln and Roosevelt, the others must have been an indifferent lot indeed.” Rexford G. Tugwell in his study, The Enlargement of the Presidency described Cleveland as a “third sort” of President, and Leonard D. White in his book on The Republican Era, 1869-1901 maintained Cleveland did not “bespeak executive leadership of Congress.”1 

James Bryce, writing in Cleveland’s day, observed there had not been a single presidential candidate since Lincoln’s reelection in 1864, except Grant, “of whom his friends could say that he had done anything to command the gratitude of the nation.” And “since the heroes of the Revolution died out...no President except Abraham Lincoln has displayed rare and striking qualities in the chair.” And Henry Adams, another contemporary of Cleveland, searching “the whole list of Congress, Judiciary, and Executive during the twenty-five years from 1870 to 1895,” found “little but damaged reputation. The period was poor in purpose and barren in results.”2 

“The office of the President,” Alexander Hamilton predicted in 1788, “will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications...It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters preeminent for ability and virtue.”3 

While probably none of America’s Presidents can be described as evil or as a demagogue, most of them have not possessed the qualifications or stature portended by Hamilton. To the contrary, a number of critics of the American system of politics and government contend it does not produce the ablest persons for the Presidency. Bryce, the leading and most influential observer of our system during the Gilded Age, and at a time when Cleveland was President, concluded “Great men are not chosen Presidents…because great men are rare in politics...because the method of choice does not bring them to the top…[and] because they are not, in quiet times, absolutely needed.” And Bryce further concluded that the Presidents of the Gilded Age, including Cleveland, “are not like the early Presidents, the first men of the country.”4 

The most meaningful way to judge a President is on the basis of what he did as President — his achievements in the White House — and not on his popular standing, not on what he said he hoped to do, and not on what he said or did before becoming or after leaving as President. Despite the obvious usefulness of this means to assess a President, Presidents have been measured in a variety of ways and with changing values, and this has led to an assortment of conclusions about them. For example, on the basis of public popularity, for deciding America’s greatest Presidents, Eisenhower would rate higher than Lincoln. And if courage, devotion, or hard work were the only criteria, John Quincy Adams would be among the very top. In March 1980, a New York Times CBS Poll reported that more Republicans would elect Eisenhower President, if they could, than anyone else how has held the office, and Americans at large would elect John F. Kennedy President over anyone who has ever held the office.5 

Despite what some important contemporaries and scholars thought of Cleveland, he is considered to be one of our greatest Presidents. In two polls on presidential greatness conducted by Arthur M. Schlesinger in 1948 and 1962, Cleveland was rated one of America’s greatest Presidents. It was the consensus of historians, political scientists, and others asked by Schlesinger that there have been eleven great Presidents (ten in the 1948 poll) — five Great in the order of Lincoln, Washington, F.D.R., Wilson and Jefferson and six Near Great in order of Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Polk and Truman tied, John Adams and Cleveland. 

Cleveland was placed in the Near Great category during both polls, being number either on the first and ahead of Adams and Polk, and number eleven on the second. Why he dropped three notches in the interval is not clear, but Thomas Bailey suggests “that by 1962, the bloom had worn off” of Allan Nevins’ admiring biography (1933) of Cleveland and that “perhaps the 19th century rugged individualism of stubborn old Grover did not fit into the hope-freighted atmosphere of Kennedy’s New Frontier.”6 Cleveland achieved his greatness in these polls, according to Schlesinger, because of his stubborn championship of tariff reform and of honesty and efficiency in the civil service. 

In an extension of the Schlesinger poll, a University of Kansas sociologist polled in a random way the membership of the Organization of American Historians on the an evaluation of Presidents and published his findings in 1970. Overall, Cleveland did well being rated between twelfth and fourteenth among Presidents in general prestige, strength of action, activeness, idealism, and accomplishments. Only on the matter of flexibility did Cleveland receive a low rating ― twenty-seventh among the Presidents.7 But this only served to strengthen the belief about one of the great sides of his character — his unyielding determination. 

Cleveland has remained attractive to historians. In a sampling of the recent editions of some of the leading college textbooks in American history, where the vast majority of Americans still learn their American history, Cleveland continues to be (1) the ablest and most respectable President between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, (2) the only outstanding President of the post-Civil War Presidents, (3) the only President of these years who had sufficient courage to defy the groups that were using government for selfish purposes and to risk his career in defense of what he thought was right, (4) and a President who vigorously used his powers and who worked fully within the Democratic tradition of the strong presidency.8 

But some of these same historians and others conclude that Cleveland failed to give leadership to Congress and failed to provide effective leadership for the country, the he had too narrow a conception of his powers and duties to be a successful President, and that he was not a skillful political leader.9 

Despite these mixed feelings about Cleveland there has been no move to cashier him from the list of America’s greatest Presidents, because historians need one between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, although this could happen in subsequent polls and evaluations. Rather, historians have continued to think of him, despite his shortcomings, as “the flower of American political culture in the Gilded Age,” and as “the sole reasonable facsimile of a major president between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt,” as Richard Hofstadter described him in the 1950s.10 

Cleveland’s greatness as a President commonly rests, not so much upon his accomplishments or brilliance as upon his character. Most historians agree that because of his character he will have a special place in the history of the Presidency. Historians have praised Cleveland for his courage, firmness, uprightness sense of duty, and common sense. They have described him as having a steely stubbornness, of being ruggedly independent, of standing like an oak for his principles, of having the courage to scorn popularity, of rising above the needs of the party and keeping unerringly in view the needs of the country, of not being able to be bought or bullied, and as being the prototype of jut-jawed firmness. Thus the portrait of a fearless and heroic figure hewing the line developed, and in general, historians have maintained it. 

Cleveland, a strapping figure of about 250 pounds, came to the White House in 1885 with the reputation of a reformer and a man of courage, integrity, and prodigious work habits. Actually he was imaginative, obdurate, brutally forthright and candid. He was also a thoroughgoing conservative, a believer in sound money, and a defender of property rights. In his inaugural address he promised to better adhere to “business principles,” and his cabinet included conservatives and business-minded Democrats. His administration indicated no significant break with his Republican predecessors on fundamental issues. Yet he appealed to Americans, because he seemed to be a plain man of the people, and because he consistently appeared to do what he believed was right. The public admired him for what was called his “you be damnedness” and it loved him for the enemies he made. 

William Allen White, a little later on, described Cleveland in the following manner. “he was plain-spoken. If he thought a proposition was a steal, he said so, and he used short words. A robber...a thief...a sneak...a liar, and a cheat were no perfunctory titles in the bright lexicon of Cleveland’s veto messages. Naturally the people we pleased...  What the people desired just then with a furious passion was a vigorous, uncompromising man...who would save the State from its statesmen. The times crying out for an obstructionist to stem corruption found young Grover Cleveland.”11 

In his first inaugural address, Cleveland stressed such words as “responsibility,” “conscience,” and “duty,” and thee became important aspects of the tone and style of his Presidency. This is clearly demonstrated by the long hours and hard work he put in such as working until two or three in the morning, personally taking care of his own correspondence and not using stenographers, and by answering White House telephone calls in person, not too heavy a burden when there were probably no more than a few score telephones in Washington at the time.12 

Another characteristic of Cleveland was his meticulous attention to details. His handling of pension bills is a good example of this. As a practicing lawyer, he had learned not to sign documents without reading them. Thus when hundreds of private pension bills for Civil War veterans came to his desk, he scrutinized each bill for flaws and vetoed several hundred that he found objectionable. More than that he laboriously wrote individual veto messages detailing his objections. While his actions had their roots in his great sense of responsibility and his never taking anything for granted, his critics complained that he would have been a better President and the country would have been better off if he allowed these minor wrongs to go on. “Instead of playing Boy at the Dike,” as Thomas Bailey puts it, “he could better go to bed for a good night’s sleep, and the face the big problems confronting the country the next morning with a steady hand and a clear brain. From a purely administrative standpoint,” adds Bailey, “the critics were right.” Cleveland had fallen prey to the tyranny of the trivial, although on the whole he was a competent administrator.13 

Doing just about everything himself was another part of Cleveland’s style. Tugwell believes Cleveland was potentially the ablest administrator of the Gilded Age Presidents. But he had the compulsion to do everything himself, so that it would be done in what he considered to be a proper way.14 Cleveland examined every item of executive business and spent long hours of the day and night on minor tasks and details which a clerk could have handled. This unresting industry of the President and his long hours were the despair of his subordinates. He was probably the hardest worked man in Washington, and his attention to details were often considered more a fault than a virtue. So noticeable was this mannerism of Cleveland that Samuel J. Tilden observed that “he would rather do something badly for himself than have somebody else do it well.”15 Performing most of the tasks himself made it difficult if not impossible for Cleveland to give the attention he should have given to some of the larger issues. And on occasion they would come on him unexpectedly. 

His work habits did not go unnoticed. “His is the intuitive instinct of the quick and alert observer,” said the New York Times, “as well as the careful habit of conscientious investigator. He has great application, which is another name of will power.”16 

Honesty also pervaded Cleveland’s style and tone. He worked to keep both major and minor matters honest, and William Allen White says “It was all honest.”17 For example he insisted on personally paying for the hay supplied by the government in the barn set aside at the White House for the President’s private use.18 And when Cleveland went on vacation he paid for his own expenses. In Cleveland’s view if business had to be done it had to be done honestly. William Allen White observed that “as a statesman Cleveland will be remembered as one who every hour of the working day did what he thought was exactly right, and who never attempted to guide the current of the public business, but always to see that the business was wisely and honestly done.19 

An unswerving loyalty to duty also characterized Cleveland’s Presidency. Looking upon his office as a covenant with the people he sincerely believed he had a deep obligation to them as a whole. Thus loyalty to duty was first and foremost in his Presidency, and duty in his mind was what was best for the people. “Cleveland has never governed his conduct by any other rule than his own perception of the right of the matter,” wrote White.20 

Cleveland’s sense of duty made it nearly impossible for him to compromise. He might have had a quieter life in the White House, with fewer troubles and disappointments had he been more inclined to compromise and had he been less scrupulous about exactness or rightness of duty. He might have avoided and improved situations had he been more flexible and agreeable with those who opposed his views. “Probably his greatest weakness was his inability to meet men agreeably,” said Henry L. Stoddard, “particularly those who differed in opinion with him. He was always suspicious of them, and was too easily moved to denounce them personally. What is now called ‘Cleveland Courage,’ continues Stoddard, “was in his day known in Washington in most instances of obstinacy.”21 

Cleveland’s sense of duty created not only an atmosphere of courage and loyalty but also one of antagonism, bluntness, narrowness, negativism, and stubbornness. These limited or prevented Cleveland from exercising effective leadership to promote positive programs and to take positive action to ameliorate difficult situations. Such was Cleveland’s loyalty to to duty that an analysis of it in the New York Times appearing just two days before he left office in 1897 concluded: “It has completely estranged powerful Democrats who were able to deprive him of the support of great States and to turn against him their Members and Senators. It has provoked implacable emnities potent enough to obstruct or thwart his greatest designs and highest policies.”22 Commenting on Cleveland’s sense of duty, Harry Thurston Peck wrote, “But it was Cleveland’s lot to alienate in turn every important interest, faction and party in the United States; and he did this always in obedience to his own matured conception of his duty.”23 

Antagonism and scorn were also part of Cleveland’s style and tone. If people were cheating the public he was not afraid to scold them publicly. A pension veto illustrates the point. In 1886, Congress granted a pension to a certain William Bishop. An examination of the cse revealed that Bishop had been in the army only one month and seventeen days, 35 of which he had spent in the hospital because of measles. In his message vetoing this pension claim Cleveland wrote, “Fifteen years after this brilliant service and terrific encounter with the measles, the claimant discovered that his attack of measles had some relation to his army enrollment and that this disease had ‘settled in his eyes, also affecting his spinal column’.”24 

Cleveland’s opponents were furious at his sarcastic tone, but they did not attempt to deny his contention in this matter. To the veteran the President seemed to be sneering at the Union soldiers, but he was actually venting his righteous indignation upon one whom he regarded as a fraud attempting a raid on the public treasury. 

Cleveland was President during a period when politics and politicians were under heavy criticism by thoughtful observers such as Adams and Bryce, and when the Presidency itself was at a low ebb in power and prestige, and when national political power was largely vested in Congress. In these years the Whig theory of the Presidency prevailed holding that the President must confine himself to the execution of laws enacted by Congress. 

Though Cleveland was a Democrat, he shared the Whig-Republican view of the extent of federal power and the role of the President in domestic matters. These did not extend very much to the maintenance of prosperity nor to the increase of well being, and did not include much responsibility for avoiding or ameliorating conditions precipitating the social and labor unrest of the 1890s. Cleveland was, in fact, a simple man to have been President toward the end of the nineteenth century, concludes Tugwell, who writes about him that “He was as innocent as a child of the large thoughts a statesman must have had about his nation’s position in the world,” and “he probably had never considered, either, the role of government in an industrialized society.”25 

The Presidency is what the President thinks it is and what he makes it. The Constitution does not define in detail the powers of a President. It requires only that he will faithfully execute his office, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and take care that the laws be faithfully executed. The fulfillment of these requirements is left to each President as he thinks best. 

Like other Chief Executives, Cleveland had his own conception of the Presidency. Hs view of the office was largely influenced by his sense of responsibility and up-rightness and by his conservatism. Thus his conception was both strong and weak. The President should do all he possibly could to assure the national good but without encroaching upon or pushing the legislative or judicial branches of government. He would not pursue social adventures, but if order or security were threatened he would take action against disturbers and aggressors. Cleveland firmly believed in the doctrine of the separation of powers and regarded the Presidency as “essentially executive in nature.” Furthermore he believed the most important benefit he could confer on the country by his Presidency was “to insist upon the entire independence of the Executive and legislative branches of the government and to compel the members of the legislative branch to see that they have responsibilities of their own.”26 And while Cleveland viewed the Presidency as “pre-eminently the people’s office,” he also regarded it as one in which he had the duty to exercise all his powers to protect the interests of the federal government.27 

Cleveland’s view of the Presidency could be described as a mixed or combined view — insisting upon the independence of the different branches of government, yet holding to the idea of a strong executive and of government for the people pre-eminently. This is why he is sometimes called “A Third Kind of President” — one moving between the strong concept exemplified by Lincoln and the weak concept represented by Buchanan. According to Sydney Hyman, the Cleveland Presidency shuttled between these two concepts of the Presidency. “Now it seems to say that Presidential office is chiefly an administrative one; now it seems to say it is also a political one,” writes Hyman. “Now it talks of leading march toward brave new horizons; now it draws back from adventure. Now it seems prepared to follow the lead of the Congress; now it seems disposed to tell the Congress to mind its own business and to keep its nose out of Executive business.” But Hyman concludes that the distinctive trait in the Cleveland concept of the Presidency is that the essential Presidential function lies defensive directions. It lies in veto, in disengagement, in the negation of what others have put in motion, or in use of only enough executive energy to maintain an existing equilibrium.28 

Cleveland not only characterized the Presidency as preeminently the people’s office, but was determined to be a President of the people. In an address he made in 1887 he emphasized this view: “If your President should not be of the people and one of your fellow citizens, he would be utterly unfit for the position, incapable of understanding the people’s wants and careless of their desires.” And Cleveland wanted his Presidency to be of all the people. “The President and the President alone,” he asserted, “represents the American citizen, no matter how humble or in how remote a corner of the globe.”29 Fully aware that the President was elected from all parts of the country while members of Congress were chosen from geographical areas, Cleveland was concerned about representing the people as a whole. This view in part influenced his handling of the Pullman strike when he said the strike was hindering the mails for the country as a whole. This attitude also influenced his thinking in regard to political machines and office seekers. 

Cleveland’s belief in a hands-off attitude on his part toward legislation was in line with the prevalent view in the Gilded Age that the President should not attempt to shape legislation nor to meddle in the affairs of Congress. He did not begin to influence the form of legislation until about halfway through his first term, and he did little to follow through on legislation. In his second term he leaned more toward the view that the President should help push laws through, and his efforts in behalf of repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1893 indicate this change. But Cleveland’s leadership in this instance was in behalf of negative rather than positive action. Though he said that “the administration must be ready with some excellent substitute for the Sherman Law,” he failed to offer any constructive alternative. And he continued to hold the view that the President should work independently of the legislative branch if this would be done. 

At times Cleveland’s different views about the Presidency clashed and were tested under provocation when Cleveland acted more like a strong president than a weak one. He faced no crisis of the magnitude that confronted Jackson, Buchanan or Lincoln, unless the depression of 1893-97 is so regarded, but on two important occasions, the Pullman strike and Venezuelan boundary dispute, he was not reluctant to expand the powers of the Presidency. As Lincoln was called on to preserve the Union, says Tugwell, “Cleveland was asked to preserve order and to ensure the national influence in the Western Hemisphere.”30 Perhaps Cleveland’s views of the Presidency were also tested but found wanting in the problems created by the rise of industrialism and urbanism, especially during the depression of the nineties. 

Yet for all his shortcomings, Cleveland continues to be rated as one of the country’s ablest Presidents. This is because he is remembered for his independence and courage, always a rare thing in public life and particularly rare in the Gilded Age. 

Notes 

1Thomas A. Bailey, Presidential Greatness, The Image and the Man from George Washington to Present (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1966), 300, 302; Rexford G. Tugwell, The Enlargement of the Presidency (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1960), 248, 250; Leonard D. White, The Republican Era, 1869-1901 (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1958), 25. 

2James Bryce, The American Commonwealth 2 Vols. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1895), I, 78, II, 224-25; Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Random House, Modern Library Edition, 1931), 294. 

3Quoted from Introduction by Morton Borden, ed., America’s Eleven Greatest Presidents, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1971). 

4Bryce, I, 84-85. 

5Borden, New York Times, March 18,1980, 138. 

6Bailey, Presidential Greatness, 29. 

7Gary M. Maranell, “The Evaluation of Presidents: An Extension of the Schlesinger Polls,” Journal of American History, LVII (1970), 104-113. 

8Richard N. Current, T. Harry Williams and Frank Freidel, American History: A Survey 4th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), II, 518; Oscar Handlin, America, A History (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), 263; Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, and William E. Leuchtenburg, The Growth of the American Republic, 2 Vols., 7 ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), II, 162; Robert Kelley, The Shaping of the Democratic Past (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1978, 447. 

9John M. Blume et. al., The National Experience, 4 ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1977), 473; Morison, Commager, and Leuchtenberg, II, 161; John A. Garraty, The American Nation, 4 ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 522; Thomas A. Bailey and David M. Kennedy, The American Pageant, 6 ed. (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1979), II, 477-78. 

10Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Vintage Books, 1959) 185, 180. 

11William Allen White, “Cleveland,” McClure’s Magazine, 18 (1901-02), 324. 

12George F. Parker, “Cleveland the Man,” McClure’s Magazine, 32 (1908-09), 339. Harry Thurston Peck, Twenty Years of the Republic, 1885-1905 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1929), 441; Wilfred E. Binkley, The Man in the White House, His Powers and Duties, Rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 172. 

13Bailey, Presidential Greatness, 215-16. 

14Tugwell, Enlargement of the Presidency, 235. 

15Peck, Twenty Years of the Republic, 441; James Morgan, Our Presidents (New York: Macmillan Co., 1935), 221. 

16New York Times, July 17, 1884. 

17White, “Cleveland,” 325. 

18Joel Benton, “Retrospective Glimpses of Cleveland,” Forum, 40 (1908), 193. 

19White, “Cleveland,” 330. 

20Ibid., 325. 

21Henry L. Stoddard, As I knew Them, Presidents and Politics from Grant to Coolidge (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927), 152. 

22New York Times, March 2, 1897. 

23Harry Thurston Peck, “Grover Cleveland — Some Comments and Conclusions,” Forum, 40 (1908), 187. 

24James D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1909), VIII, 134. 

25Tugwell, Enlargement of the Presidency, 247. 

26White, Republican Era, 25. 

27Marcus Cunliffe, American Presidents and the Presidency (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1969), 145. 

28Sydney Hyman, “What is the President’s True Role,” New York Times Magazine, September 7, 1958, 17. 

29George F. Parker, ed., Writing and Speeches of Cleveland (New York: Cassell Publishing Co., 1892), 116. Robert McElroy, Grover Cleveland, The Man and the Statesman, 2 Vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1923), I, 100. 

30Tugwell, Enlargement of the Presidency, 248.