SeleucusNicator
Diadoch
His enemies knew him as "Uncle Jumbo"; his supporters knew him as "Grover the Good." Most trivia enthusiasts know him as the only American President to serve non-consecutive terms. But who was Grover Cleveland? Where did he come from? What were his beliefs and principles? These and other fine questions are what this article seeks to explain.
Born Stephen Grover Cleveland in Caldwell, New Jersey, on March 18, 1837, his father was a Presbyterian minister, and the family lived an itinerant life as Rev. Cleveland moved from congregation to congregation, mostly in upstate and western New York. At some point during this movement, Cleveland decided that he disliked the name Stephen, and henceforth always referred to himself as simply Grover. This would stick for the rest of his life. As an adolescent, Grover worked odd jobs along the Erie Canal, interspliced with some formal schooling. When he was 16, however, his father died, and Cleveland never again went to school, for he needed to work full time. Eventually tiring of life along the canal, he decided to move to Ohio, but, along the way, he decided to visit his uncle, who worked as a stockbroker in Buffalo, New York. His uncle encouraged young Grover to stay in Buffalo, where he was eventually trained as a lawyer. In 1859, he was admitted to the New York bar, and his political career could begin.
During the next decade, Grover did two things which his political enemies ended up using against him. The first of these was in 1863, when Cleveland found himself drafted for the Civil War. Instead of going to war, he paid a Polish immigrant $150 to go for him; a practice which was both legal and common at the time, but which obviously was considered dishonorable, if not cowardly, especially once the war had ended. The second, and more serious of his two mistakes happened in the early 1870's; he became "acquainted" Maria Halpin, who in 1874 gave birth to a son and claimed that Grover Cleveland was the father. Cleveland did not believe this; he thought that several other men were more likely to be the father. But all of the other possible fathers were not only close friends of his, but also married. Not wanting any of his friends marriages to go to ruin, the bachelor Cleveland accepted the paternity claim and agreed to pay child support, but not to marry Ms. Halpin. Shortly thereafter, however, Maria Halpin became an alcoholic, and Cleveland arranged for her to be institutionalized and the child to be put into an orphanage; he personally paid for the child's expenses there as well. But Ms. Halpin soon escaped from the institution and kidnapped the child from the orphanage, at which point Cleveland paid her $500 to leave New York and return the child; the plan worked. The child was returned and eventually adopted by a wealthy New Yorker; he grew up to become a doctor.
More important, however, was what Cleveland didn't do at this point in his life. Though active in politics as a Democrat (he idolized Andrew Jackson), he never became part of a political machine, for he was personally oppose to any concentration of power among elites. This same feeling led to not just his strong dislike the patronage system, whereby government jobs went to supporters and cronies of politicans, but also to his strong distrust of banks and corporations, especially monopolies. As such, he never got embroiled in the scandals of the time, most of which took one of two forms: a politician would be found to have given government jobs to friends who turned out to be unqualified, former criminals, or both, or a politician would be found to have accepted stock from a corporation and then to have championed the interests of that corporation in government, thereby raising the value of that stock. Of course, there was another reason Cleveland didn't engage in corruption: he didn't need to financially. Unlike most politicans, he was unmarried and had no family. As such, unlike his colleagues, he could live well on a meager government salary.
Cleveland's first position was as sheriff of his home county; in this post, he is most famous for refusing to hire an executioner (as most sheriffs had done) and instead performing executions himself. He personally hanged at least two criminals in his tenure. A few years later, his reputation as "an honest man" and the hope that he would be a reformer won him a surprise victory as Mayor of Buffalo against a corrupt opponent. He quickly began to veto bills that involved government cooperation with corporations (mostly to build some sort of internal improvement) because he saw them as corrupt, ignoring the fact that killing a new road or canal improvement might prove unpopular. Cleveland, amazingly, became perhaps the only politician to improve his standing by opposing popular legislation; in an era where politicians left and right were being exposed as liars and frauds, his willingness to stand by his beliefs, even when they were unpopular, gave him the reputation of a principled and honest public servant. Living in an era of widespread corruption, he was fortunate in having opponents who were, in modern terms, "slimy" and against whom he contrasted very favorably; his reformer image soon got him elected Governor of New York in 1882 over yet another corrupt candidate.
Because New York was an electorally-rich swing state, the Democrats began to look towards Cleveland as a potential Presidential candidate for 1884. His chances for the nomination were helped dramatically by the Republican Party's choice for their own nominee: James G. Blaine. A former Speaker of the House and a resident of Maine (with which his last name conveniently rhymed), Blaine was known as "the plumed knight" because of his powerful and eloquent oratory -- but he was also known for less scrupulous things. Rumors abounded that he had accepted stock from corporations whose interests he defended in Congress -- and, moreover, that he then took reprehensible steps to cover this up. One example stuck out like a sore thumb. When the Democrats took control of the House after Blaine's term as Speaker, they began an investigation into the charges against him. One man testified before a committee that he had letters proving that Blaine had accepted stock from a corporation in exchange for support. Blaine managed to shut down the committee for one day after hearing his, and, that evening, he went to the witness and asked to see the letters. The man agreed, but only if Blaine would immediately return the letters upon reading them. Blaine took the letters and ran out of the room. The next day, the man reported this theft to the committee investigating Blaine; the results were, of course, embarassing for Blaine.
Eventually, Blaine read each of the letters he had stolen on the floor of the House and explained each of them in a way favorable to his reputation. This lessened the effect of the scandal, but his theft of them remained as a stain on his reputation. The "plumed knight" was therefore closely associated with the unclean politics of the time, and Democrats quickly came up with the following rhyme:
Blaine's nomination caused alarm among independents and among reform-minded Republicans, who refused to support him and claimed that they would vote not on party lines, but for "an honest man." These became known as the "Mugwumps", and the Democrats quickly went about securing their support. Knowing that Grover Cleveland owed his political success almost entirely to his reputation as "an honest man", they nominated the New York Governor, and the race became competitive.
No Democrat had been elected President since 1856; an entire generation had grown up knowing only Republican Presidents and assuming that the Republican Party was America's party. Under this environment, any Democrat entered the election as the underdog, and Cleveland was no exception. Two events, however, soon changed this. First, Blaine's campaign attempted to use the fact that Cleveland had sired an illegitimate child against him -- it would, after all, be a shocking story even today, let alone in 1884. This attempt left us with the following Republican slogan:
However, the attempt backfired. When Cleveland was asked how the campaign should respond to the use of this story against him, he simply replied "tell the truth." Cleveland admitted to everything, and a New York minister quickly wrote a nationally-distributed letter explaining how Cleveland's actions during the affair always represented the most honorable choice. At any other time in American history, admitting that one had sired an illegitimate child and had the mother institutionalized and then defending that action would be political suicide. But in this time of massive corruption and shady dealing, the public demand for an "honest man" was so great that this admission actually helped Cleveland dramatically. The election began to swing in his favor. Finally, a Blaine supporter put the final nail in the Republican's coffin. At a rally shortly before the election, a New York minister who supported Blaine condemned the Democrats as the party of "Rum, Rebellion, and Romanism" -- alluding to the Democrats' support among ex-confederates and among Catholic immigrants (who drank alcohol in large volumes, or so the stereotype went). Blaine, who was half Irish, failed to disown this statement, and Irish voters abandoned him for Cleveland. The minister's statement, then, backfired dramatically; instead of rallying temperate protestants to Blaine, it made the "Romanists" flock to the party of Rum, which, after all, they viewed as a good thing.
The last minute switch of the Irish vote secured the electoral votes of New York for Cleveland, and he was elected the 22nd President of the United States -- and the first Democratic President in a long time. His inauguration set new records for attendance, as Democrats from all over the country flocked to see a Democrat take the oath of office. Especially popular at the inaugural festivities were old men who vowed to never shave their beards until a Democrat was in the White House, whose long beards were quite the attraction -- and, presumably, quite the profit for Washington DC barbers once Cleveland took office.
Early in Cleveland's term, the issue most focused on was patronage and civil service reform. Cleveland found himself in an uncomfortable situation; with no Democratic President since James Buchanan left office in 1861, most government jobs were filled with Republicans, many of whom were incompetent and there only because of politics. Democrats, especially old-style party leaders who grew up in the spoils system, urged Cleveland to purge the Republicans and appoint partisan Democrats. Independents and reformers, on the other hand, urged Cleveland to extend civil service reform and avoid the temptation of patronage. Under Cleveland's predecessor, a law had been passed allowing the President to designate some government jobs as apolitical, and therefore given out to those who passed a qualification exam rather than appointed politically. Republicans, on the third hand, did not want their partisans to lose those jobs, and stood ready to use their control of the Senate, which had to approve Presidential appointments, as a weapon against Cleveland. In the end, Cleveland pleased nobody. He did not purge Republicans, angering his own supporters. He expanded civil service reform only minorly, causing independents and Mugwumps to feel betrayed. And whenever a Republican retired, he appointed a Democrat to replace him, thus naturally angering Republicans. However, Cleveland at least did one thing better than his predecessors: he checked the qualifications of each Democrat he appointed (most of whom were suggested to him by lower-level party leaders) and refused to appoint unqualified men or criminals for political expediency. He publicly recalled the nominations of several men found to have been criminals and often wrote angry letters to those who suggested unqualified candidates to him. This allowed him to keep both his reputation for honesty and his reputation as a reformer.
Cleveland also took two of his trademark unpopular positions during his first term. First, he began to massively veto pension bills. At the time, there was a pension bureau for wounded Civil War veterans, to which veterans or their widows could apply if they had been injured during the war and therefore could not work. The idea was to provide a living for those who could no longer provide for themselves due to injury sustained in defense of the nation. Unfortunately, sometimes the bureau rejected an applicant -- usually because he was either not a veteran or had sustained his injuries in something other than the Civil War -- such as by hopping over a fence twelve years later (a real example). Other such applicants included a widow who blamed her husband's 1876 heart attack on an ankle wound sustained in 1863, and a man who broke his leg while walking to the enlistment office (and who never ended up enlisting). These rejected "veterans" often asked their Congressmen to create specific pension bills creating a government pension for that individual only. Congress routinely passed these bills by the hundreds; Cleveland was the first President to look over all of them and veto the ones he found to be fradulent. He ended up vetoing over a hundred of them, often sarcastically mocking the applicant in his veto message. This outraged veterans, especially given Cleveland's history as a draft-dodger, but, once again, it increased his reputation as a reformer.
Cleveland also sought in his first term to lower the tariff. Republicans and Democrats differed in their views on the tariff as such: Democrats believed that a tariff should be used only for government revenue, and that rates should be no higher than the amount needed to fund government expenditures. Republicans believed that a tariff should also protect industry, and, as such, under a Republican tariff, the government took in much more money from the tariff than it needed for its operations, creating a massive government surplus. When Cleveland came into office, this surplus worried him greatly, for he believed that it was better off being used for development than sitting in a government treasury. As such, he sought to lower the tariff to a revenue-only level. Because Congress was split between the two parties, he was forced to compromise, and the resulting tariff was much higher than Cleveland wanted -- but it was a reduction nonetheless. The Republicans finally found an issue that they could fight this "honest man" on. As soon as American manufacturers began losing jobs to their English competitors because of the lower tariff, they knew that they could use anti-British sentiment against Cleveland. As it turned out, they could, but not in the way they expected.
Before we get to the Election of 1888, we should note one other important event in Grover Cleveland's first term: his marriage. Specifically, he married Frances Folsom, an event controversial for two reasons. First, Frances was only 21 years old; much younger than the President. Second, Cleveland had been her legal guardian while she was growing up; a father figure in the most literal sense. This raised eyebrows across the country, but it did not stop the press from ruining Cleveland's honeymoon by surrounding his country cabin with photographers virtually twenty-four hours a day. Cleveland, unsurprisingly, grew to hate the media.
As the election of 1888 loomed, it was clear that there would be one dominating issue: the tariff. It also loomed that the election would more or less be decided by the two swing states of Indiana and New York -- the second of which, of course, was Cleveland's home state. The Republicans, therefore, nominated a resident of Indiana -- Benjamin Harrison. Harrison's grandfather, William Henry Harrison, had briefly been President (he was most famous for dying after 30 days in office in 1841) and Benjamin himself was a decorated war hero and a former Senator. Apart from that, he was a stern, bearded man with few social skills, who would soon be nicknamed "Ice Veins" for his social coldness. Predictably, during the campaign, the Republicans made a lot of the specter of "free trade" which they predicted would destroy the nation if the tariff stayed low, while Cleveland and the Democrats argued that the lower tariff would in fact benefit the United States. While the lower tariff was in fact losing jobs for the United States, the political consequences did not appear to be strong enough to cost Cleveland his job. Rather than losing his seat because of the tariff, Cleveland would lose his seat by a political trick.
Just before the election, a Republican operative wrote a letter to a British consul in the United States. Claiming (falsely) to be an American-naturalized former British subject, he asked the consul who among the candidates was most favorable to the interests of Great Britain. The consul foolishly wrote back and indicated that Cleveland's re-election would be more favorable to Britain. The Republican operative then leaked this letter to the newspapers, and Grover Cleveland immediately became known as the British candidate. For Irish voters in New York, this was unacceptable. On election day, Harrison carried New York by a slim margin -- a margin composed mostly of Irish voters who switched upon reading the letter (the fact that the Democratic Governor of New York, a man named Hill, unsure of his re-election chances, started a "Harrison for President, Hill for Governor" deal with Republicans, probably also affected the outcome) -- and Harrison also carried Indiana -- which he probably won due to massive bribery; the story goes that his supporters handed out $100 bills to voters.
The election of 1888 also saw the election of a Republican Congress, and Harrison and his party got to work reversing most of what Cleveland had done. Harrison was just as concerned about the budget surplus as his predecessor; but instead of lowering the tariff, the Republicans decided to spend the surplus; the Congress that sat from 1889 to 1891 was henceforth known as the "billion dollar congress", because it was the first body to exceed that level of spending in peacetime. Among the bills passed was the McKinley tariff of 1890, which raised the tariff to the highest level ever in American history. Also noteworthy was the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which forced the government to buy a certain amount of silver each month and turn that silver into coinage. The pro-silver coinage supporters, called "bimetalists", believed that neither gold nor silver was abundant enough to solely serve as the base for currency, and that therefore both were needed. Silver supporters in the west also believed that silver coinage would weaken the currency and therefore lead to more favorable farm prices. The Sherman Act would have important political consequences for the next decade, as well as for Cleveland's future career.
Cleveland spent the 4 years of Harrison's term in New York City working as a lawyer in relative obscurity, though he was always willing to give a political speech if his presence was requested. The four years are perhaps most notable for the birh of his firth daughter, Ruth. Ruth Cleveland soon became a media darling; she was nicknamed "Baby Ruth". It is after this Baby Ruth that both the candybar and the baseball player were named.
Born Stephen Grover Cleveland in Caldwell, New Jersey, on March 18, 1837, his father was a Presbyterian minister, and the family lived an itinerant life as Rev. Cleveland moved from congregation to congregation, mostly in upstate and western New York. At some point during this movement, Cleveland decided that he disliked the name Stephen, and henceforth always referred to himself as simply Grover. This would stick for the rest of his life. As an adolescent, Grover worked odd jobs along the Erie Canal, interspliced with some formal schooling. When he was 16, however, his father died, and Cleveland never again went to school, for he needed to work full time. Eventually tiring of life along the canal, he decided to move to Ohio, but, along the way, he decided to visit his uncle, who worked as a stockbroker in Buffalo, New York. His uncle encouraged young Grover to stay in Buffalo, where he was eventually trained as a lawyer. In 1859, he was admitted to the New York bar, and his political career could begin.
During the next decade, Grover did two things which his political enemies ended up using against him. The first of these was in 1863, when Cleveland found himself drafted for the Civil War. Instead of going to war, he paid a Polish immigrant $150 to go for him; a practice which was both legal and common at the time, but which obviously was considered dishonorable, if not cowardly, especially once the war had ended. The second, and more serious of his two mistakes happened in the early 1870's; he became "acquainted" Maria Halpin, who in 1874 gave birth to a son and claimed that Grover Cleveland was the father. Cleveland did not believe this; he thought that several other men were more likely to be the father. But all of the other possible fathers were not only close friends of his, but also married. Not wanting any of his friends marriages to go to ruin, the bachelor Cleveland accepted the paternity claim and agreed to pay child support, but not to marry Ms. Halpin. Shortly thereafter, however, Maria Halpin became an alcoholic, and Cleveland arranged for her to be institutionalized and the child to be put into an orphanage; he personally paid for the child's expenses there as well. But Ms. Halpin soon escaped from the institution and kidnapped the child from the orphanage, at which point Cleveland paid her $500 to leave New York and return the child; the plan worked. The child was returned and eventually adopted by a wealthy New Yorker; he grew up to become a doctor.
More important, however, was what Cleveland didn't do at this point in his life. Though active in politics as a Democrat (he idolized Andrew Jackson), he never became part of a political machine, for he was personally oppose to any concentration of power among elites. This same feeling led to not just his strong dislike the patronage system, whereby government jobs went to supporters and cronies of politicans, but also to his strong distrust of banks and corporations, especially monopolies. As such, he never got embroiled in the scandals of the time, most of which took one of two forms: a politician would be found to have given government jobs to friends who turned out to be unqualified, former criminals, or both, or a politician would be found to have accepted stock from a corporation and then to have championed the interests of that corporation in government, thereby raising the value of that stock. Of course, there was another reason Cleveland didn't engage in corruption: he didn't need to financially. Unlike most politicans, he was unmarried and had no family. As such, unlike his colleagues, he could live well on a meager government salary.
Cleveland's first position was as sheriff of his home county; in this post, he is most famous for refusing to hire an executioner (as most sheriffs had done) and instead performing executions himself. He personally hanged at least two criminals in his tenure. A few years later, his reputation as "an honest man" and the hope that he would be a reformer won him a surprise victory as Mayor of Buffalo against a corrupt opponent. He quickly began to veto bills that involved government cooperation with corporations (mostly to build some sort of internal improvement) because he saw them as corrupt, ignoring the fact that killing a new road or canal improvement might prove unpopular. Cleveland, amazingly, became perhaps the only politician to improve his standing by opposing popular legislation; in an era where politicians left and right were being exposed as liars and frauds, his willingness to stand by his beliefs, even when they were unpopular, gave him the reputation of a principled and honest public servant. Living in an era of widespread corruption, he was fortunate in having opponents who were, in modern terms, "slimy" and against whom he contrasted very favorably; his reformer image soon got him elected Governor of New York in 1882 over yet another corrupt candidate.
Because New York was an electorally-rich swing state, the Democrats began to look towards Cleveland as a potential Presidential candidate for 1884. His chances for the nomination were helped dramatically by the Republican Party's choice for their own nominee: James G. Blaine. A former Speaker of the House and a resident of Maine (with which his last name conveniently rhymed), Blaine was known as "the plumed knight" because of his powerful and eloquent oratory -- but he was also known for less scrupulous things. Rumors abounded that he had accepted stock from corporations whose interests he defended in Congress -- and, moreover, that he then took reprehensible steps to cover this up. One example stuck out like a sore thumb. When the Democrats took control of the House after Blaine's term as Speaker, they began an investigation into the charges against him. One man testified before a committee that he had letters proving that Blaine had accepted stock from a corporation in exchange for support. Blaine managed to shut down the committee for one day after hearing his, and, that evening, he went to the witness and asked to see the letters. The man agreed, but only if Blaine would immediately return the letters upon reading them. Blaine took the letters and ran out of the room. The next day, the man reported this theft to the committee investigating Blaine; the results were, of course, embarassing for Blaine.
Eventually, Blaine read each of the letters he had stolen on the floor of the House and explained each of them in a way favorable to his reputation. This lessened the effect of the scandal, but his theft of them remained as a stain on his reputation. The "plumed knight" was therefore closely associated with the unclean politics of the time, and Democrats quickly came up with the following rhyme:
Blaine's nomination caused alarm among independents and among reform-minded Republicans, who refused to support him and claimed that they would vote not on party lines, but for "an honest man." These became known as the "Mugwumps", and the Democrats quickly went about securing their support. Knowing that Grover Cleveland owed his political success almost entirely to his reputation as "an honest man", they nominated the New York Governor, and the race became competitive.
No Democrat had been elected President since 1856; an entire generation had grown up knowing only Republican Presidents and assuming that the Republican Party was America's party. Under this environment, any Democrat entered the election as the underdog, and Cleveland was no exception. Two events, however, soon changed this. First, Blaine's campaign attempted to use the fact that Cleveland had sired an illegitimate child against him -- it would, after all, be a shocking story even today, let alone in 1884. This attempt left us with the following Republican slogan:
However, the attempt backfired. When Cleveland was asked how the campaign should respond to the use of this story against him, he simply replied "tell the truth." Cleveland admitted to everything, and a New York minister quickly wrote a nationally-distributed letter explaining how Cleveland's actions during the affair always represented the most honorable choice. At any other time in American history, admitting that one had sired an illegitimate child and had the mother institutionalized and then defending that action would be political suicide. But in this time of massive corruption and shady dealing, the public demand for an "honest man" was so great that this admission actually helped Cleveland dramatically. The election began to swing in his favor. Finally, a Blaine supporter put the final nail in the Republican's coffin. At a rally shortly before the election, a New York minister who supported Blaine condemned the Democrats as the party of "Rum, Rebellion, and Romanism" -- alluding to the Democrats' support among ex-confederates and among Catholic immigrants (who drank alcohol in large volumes, or so the stereotype went). Blaine, who was half Irish, failed to disown this statement, and Irish voters abandoned him for Cleveland. The minister's statement, then, backfired dramatically; instead of rallying temperate protestants to Blaine, it made the "Romanists" flock to the party of Rum, which, after all, they viewed as a good thing.
The last minute switch of the Irish vote secured the electoral votes of New York for Cleveland, and he was elected the 22nd President of the United States -- and the first Democratic President in a long time. His inauguration set new records for attendance, as Democrats from all over the country flocked to see a Democrat take the oath of office. Especially popular at the inaugural festivities were old men who vowed to never shave their beards until a Democrat was in the White House, whose long beards were quite the attraction -- and, presumably, quite the profit for Washington DC barbers once Cleveland took office.
Early in Cleveland's term, the issue most focused on was patronage and civil service reform. Cleveland found himself in an uncomfortable situation; with no Democratic President since James Buchanan left office in 1861, most government jobs were filled with Republicans, many of whom were incompetent and there only because of politics. Democrats, especially old-style party leaders who grew up in the spoils system, urged Cleveland to purge the Republicans and appoint partisan Democrats. Independents and reformers, on the other hand, urged Cleveland to extend civil service reform and avoid the temptation of patronage. Under Cleveland's predecessor, a law had been passed allowing the President to designate some government jobs as apolitical, and therefore given out to those who passed a qualification exam rather than appointed politically. Republicans, on the third hand, did not want their partisans to lose those jobs, and stood ready to use their control of the Senate, which had to approve Presidential appointments, as a weapon against Cleveland. In the end, Cleveland pleased nobody. He did not purge Republicans, angering his own supporters. He expanded civil service reform only minorly, causing independents and Mugwumps to feel betrayed. And whenever a Republican retired, he appointed a Democrat to replace him, thus naturally angering Republicans. However, Cleveland at least did one thing better than his predecessors: he checked the qualifications of each Democrat he appointed (most of whom were suggested to him by lower-level party leaders) and refused to appoint unqualified men or criminals for political expediency. He publicly recalled the nominations of several men found to have been criminals and often wrote angry letters to those who suggested unqualified candidates to him. This allowed him to keep both his reputation for honesty and his reputation as a reformer.
Cleveland also took two of his trademark unpopular positions during his first term. First, he began to massively veto pension bills. At the time, there was a pension bureau for wounded Civil War veterans, to which veterans or their widows could apply if they had been injured during the war and therefore could not work. The idea was to provide a living for those who could no longer provide for themselves due to injury sustained in defense of the nation. Unfortunately, sometimes the bureau rejected an applicant -- usually because he was either not a veteran or had sustained his injuries in something other than the Civil War -- such as by hopping over a fence twelve years later (a real example). Other such applicants included a widow who blamed her husband's 1876 heart attack on an ankle wound sustained in 1863, and a man who broke his leg while walking to the enlistment office (and who never ended up enlisting). These rejected "veterans" often asked their Congressmen to create specific pension bills creating a government pension for that individual only. Congress routinely passed these bills by the hundreds; Cleveland was the first President to look over all of them and veto the ones he found to be fradulent. He ended up vetoing over a hundred of them, often sarcastically mocking the applicant in his veto message. This outraged veterans, especially given Cleveland's history as a draft-dodger, but, once again, it increased his reputation as a reformer.
Cleveland also sought in his first term to lower the tariff. Republicans and Democrats differed in their views on the tariff as such: Democrats believed that a tariff should be used only for government revenue, and that rates should be no higher than the amount needed to fund government expenditures. Republicans believed that a tariff should also protect industry, and, as such, under a Republican tariff, the government took in much more money from the tariff than it needed for its operations, creating a massive government surplus. When Cleveland came into office, this surplus worried him greatly, for he believed that it was better off being used for development than sitting in a government treasury. As such, he sought to lower the tariff to a revenue-only level. Because Congress was split between the two parties, he was forced to compromise, and the resulting tariff was much higher than Cleveland wanted -- but it was a reduction nonetheless. The Republicans finally found an issue that they could fight this "honest man" on. As soon as American manufacturers began losing jobs to their English competitors because of the lower tariff, they knew that they could use anti-British sentiment against Cleveland. As it turned out, they could, but not in the way they expected.
Before we get to the Election of 1888, we should note one other important event in Grover Cleveland's first term: his marriage. Specifically, he married Frances Folsom, an event controversial for two reasons. First, Frances was only 21 years old; much younger than the President. Second, Cleveland had been her legal guardian while she was growing up; a father figure in the most literal sense. This raised eyebrows across the country, but it did not stop the press from ruining Cleveland's honeymoon by surrounding his country cabin with photographers virtually twenty-four hours a day. Cleveland, unsurprisingly, grew to hate the media.
As the election of 1888 loomed, it was clear that there would be one dominating issue: the tariff. It also loomed that the election would more or less be decided by the two swing states of Indiana and New York -- the second of which, of course, was Cleveland's home state. The Republicans, therefore, nominated a resident of Indiana -- Benjamin Harrison. Harrison's grandfather, William Henry Harrison, had briefly been President (he was most famous for dying after 30 days in office in 1841) and Benjamin himself was a decorated war hero and a former Senator. Apart from that, he was a stern, bearded man with few social skills, who would soon be nicknamed "Ice Veins" for his social coldness. Predictably, during the campaign, the Republicans made a lot of the specter of "free trade" which they predicted would destroy the nation if the tariff stayed low, while Cleveland and the Democrats argued that the lower tariff would in fact benefit the United States. While the lower tariff was in fact losing jobs for the United States, the political consequences did not appear to be strong enough to cost Cleveland his job. Rather than losing his seat because of the tariff, Cleveland would lose his seat by a political trick.
Just before the election, a Republican operative wrote a letter to a British consul in the United States. Claiming (falsely) to be an American-naturalized former British subject, he asked the consul who among the candidates was most favorable to the interests of Great Britain. The consul foolishly wrote back and indicated that Cleveland's re-election would be more favorable to Britain. The Republican operative then leaked this letter to the newspapers, and Grover Cleveland immediately became known as the British candidate. For Irish voters in New York, this was unacceptable. On election day, Harrison carried New York by a slim margin -- a margin composed mostly of Irish voters who switched upon reading the letter (the fact that the Democratic Governor of New York, a man named Hill, unsure of his re-election chances, started a "Harrison for President, Hill for Governor" deal with Republicans, probably also affected the outcome) -- and Harrison also carried Indiana -- which he probably won due to massive bribery; the story goes that his supporters handed out $100 bills to voters.
The election of 1888 also saw the election of a Republican Congress, and Harrison and his party got to work reversing most of what Cleveland had done. Harrison was just as concerned about the budget surplus as his predecessor; but instead of lowering the tariff, the Republicans decided to spend the surplus; the Congress that sat from 1889 to 1891 was henceforth known as the "billion dollar congress", because it was the first body to exceed that level of spending in peacetime. Among the bills passed was the McKinley tariff of 1890, which raised the tariff to the highest level ever in American history. Also noteworthy was the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which forced the government to buy a certain amount of silver each month and turn that silver into coinage. The pro-silver coinage supporters, called "bimetalists", believed that neither gold nor silver was abundant enough to solely serve as the base for currency, and that therefore both were needed. Silver supporters in the west also believed that silver coinage would weaken the currency and therefore lead to more favorable farm prices. The Sherman Act would have important political consequences for the next decade, as well as for Cleveland's future career.
Cleveland spent the 4 years of Harrison's term in New York City working as a lawyer in relative obscurity, though he was always willing to give a political speech if his presence was requested. The four years are perhaps most notable for the birh of his firth daughter, Ruth. Ruth Cleveland soon became a media darling; she was nicknamed "Baby Ruth". It is after this Baby Ruth that both the candybar and the baseball player were named.
