Useful Notes / Grover Cleveland

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Stephen Grover Cleveland (March 18, 1837 – June 24, 1908) was the first American president to serve for two non-consecutive terms, as the 22nd and 24th president (1885–89 and 1893–97),^note Cleveland was the only president with this distinction until Donald Trump became the second president to achieve this feat over a century later after winning the 2016 and 2024 elections. preceded initially by Chester A. Arthur, then followed and preceded by Benjamin Harrison, then followed, in his second term, by William McKinley. He was the seventh Democratic president. Benjamin Harrison was the 23rd president, winning the 1888 election with the counterintuitive result of Cleveland winning the popular vote but Harrison winning the Electoral College. Cleveland was one of only two bachelors elected president, after James Buchanan, but his bachelorhood ended the following year when he became the second president to get married while in office,^note The first, John Tyler, lost his first wife early in his presidency and remarried late therein. Tyler became president only because Benjamin Harrison's grandfather, William Henry Harrison, died in office during his first month. and the only one to marry in The White House itself. His wife, Frances Folsom, was 27 years younger and he was her guardian since childhood. Alongside Woodrow Wilson, he was one of the only two Democratic presidents from a period of Republican dominance in the White House lasting from 1861 to 1933. He was on the $1,000 bill, but these were discontinued in 1969.

He was drafted during The American Civil War but, choosing to advance his legal career instead, paid $150 to a Polish immigrant named George Benninsky to serve in his place (entirely legal at the time^note Fortunately for Benninsky, he survived the war.), making him America's first draft-dodger president. This, his refusal to grant bonuses to Civil War veterans, and a bad campaign helped cost him the 1888 election against Harrison. He was, at that time, the first president who had no military service, not even in his home state's militia, since Martin Van Buren.

He started his political career as the sheriff of Erie County, New York, where he executed several prisoners himself. He later served as mayor of Buffalo and governor of the state.

He may have fathered a child out of wedlock. During his 1884 presidential campaign, the Buffalo Telegraph published a story about how he had an affair with a widow named Maria Halpin, who had borne a son whom she named Oscar Folsom Cleveland, after Grover and his law partner. For most of his life, Cleveland wasn't certain that the child was his, but since denying it would mean accusing his married friends of infidelity (Halpin, by all accounts, was known for her promiscuity), he paid child support to Halpin regularly and never claimed anything to the contrary.^CodaThe boy was later adopted by a Buffalo physician, got an Adoptive Name Change to James Edward King Jr., after his stepfather, and became a locally respected doctor in his own right. His Republican opponents took the story and ran with it, heckling Cleveland with chants of "Maw, Maw, where's my Paw?" After he won the election, the Democrats reused the taunt as an Ironic Echo, adding, "Gone to the White House, haw, haw, haw!" For what it is worth, Halpin claimed he raped her. The scandal might have ruined Cleveland's campaign had his opponent, James G. Blaine, not had two comparable scandals to deal with: one involving suspicious money from railroads, and another just days before the election when one of his spokesmen gave an inflammatory, anti-Catholic speech in New York City, which virtually destroyed Blaine's support in the city, which had a lot of Catholic voters, probably throwing the election to Cleveland.

His first term as president largely marked a continuation of the stability and largely non-interventionist approach that had marked Arthur's presidency, with Cleveland making a point of not clearing out Republican appointees from government jobs given the role that patronage jobs had played in the death of Arthur's predecessor, James A Garfield. He managed to strong-arm Congress into repealing the Tenure of Office Act, which had greatly limited the president's power to hire and fire cabinet members, thus restoring some power to the White House after several decades in which Congress had wielded most of the actual political power in the country. His first four years also saw a major modernization of the country's military, which had remained in a poor state since the Civil War; this modernization drive would later pay dividends in the Spanish—American War. While Cleveland remained an overall popular president, he surprisingly lost re-election in 1888, largely thanks to a combination of Republican supporters who had been unhappy at Blaine's candidacy in 1884 returning to the fold, and the Tammany Hall political machine in New York City, with whom Cleveland had frequently feuded during his time as Governor, deliberately running a poor campaign in the city,^note Which, it should be noted, they had also done in 1884, only for their efforts to be outweighed by Blaine screwing up his campaign even worse and Cleveland losing the electoral votes of Indiana due to a combination of the death of his vice-president Thomas A. Hendricks (who was formerly the state's governor) and alleged vote-stuffing by state Republicans. Fortunately for Cleveland, Harrison proved an unpopular president and no-one else emerged as a credible rival for the Democratic nomination over the next four years, leading to his making his comeback in the 1892 election.

At the start of his second term as president, he discovered a tumor on the roof of his mouth; he had the tumor removed in a secret operation on the presidential yacht which was never revealed until well after his death.

In 1887, he met then five-year-old Franklin D. Roosevelt and reportedly said, "My little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be President of the United States." Just goes to show you should never tell a Roosevelt not to do something in any way, shape or form.^note Ironically, the young Roosevelt was visiting the White House with his father, who aligned with the "Bourbon" (pro-business) wing of the Democratic Party, like Cleveland. FDR is famous for governing as a very different sort of Democrat than Cleveland.

Libertarians regard him as a highly underrated president, as he mostly stayed within the ("original") constitutional bounds of his office and of federal power, and because he generally opposed the growth of labor unions and regulation of big business, though the latter contributed heavily to an economic crisis in his second term. He fought waste and corruption by using the veto more than every president before him combined,^note With 584 vetoes, Cleveland got the second most vetoes of any president under his belt, including 414 during his first term, most of them private bills to give pensions to individual Civil War veterans. Franklin Roosevelt has the most vetoes overall with 635, owing largely to having been president for over twelve years. which got him nicknamed "His Obstinacy", and kept America on the gold standard at a time when it was politically unpopular (even within his own party, which repudiated him to an extent in 1896 by nominating William Jennings Bryan, an outspoken critic of the gold standard, for President; Cleveland quietly supported John M. Palmer's dissident "National Democratic" presidential campaign), which is considered a big reason for the astounding economic growth in the late nineteenth century (save the Panic of 1893). He still remains acclaimed for his honesty, which is the source of another of his common nicknames, "Grover the Good". As with many other politicians of the era, his reputation suffers most in the area of civil rights. Few people argue that Cleveland was overly racist by the standards of the era, but his refusal to veto the Scott Act of 1888 (which expanded the Chinese Exclusion Act that Arthur signed) and his nomination of Melville Fuller as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court hurt his historical standing. Fuller's Court would proceed to dismantle virtually all the civil rights legislation that had been passed in the aftermath of the Civil War—most infamously with the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling which was issued during Cleveland's final year in office, giving rise to the doctrine of "separate but equal" and effectively legalizing segregation, with Cleveland coming down hard on the wrong side of history by publicly championing the ruling^note Cleveland, along with many of his political contemporaries in both major parties, may have naïvely assumed that the ruling would in fact be applied by giving Black and White people equal treatment, even if they remained segregated. Many state governments, however, interpreted it as meaning they merely had to grant Black people access to public services, not that the quality or practical availability of those services had to be comparable to those offered to White people.—in addition to weakening the rights of workers. In retirement, he also gave an interview in which he argued against women's suffrage.

As President, Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty when it was completed in 1886.

In the first year of his second term, a huge economic crisis developed, arguably the first of America's industrial age. It was caused by business overspeculation, shaky loans, and bank failures. Unemployment rose to over 18%, over 8,000 businesses collapsed within months, and people all over the country had to wait in food lines for hours so that they could feed their families. It was often known as the Great Depression before, well, the Great Depression. Unemployed workers from the Midwest marched to Washington, D.C. and over 150,000 railroad workers went on strike (the quotation at the top of the page references Cleveland using federal troops to break the strike). Cleveland ascribed the problem to the Sherman Silver Purchase Act passed during Harrison's term. He called on Congress to repeal the act, which it did, but this caused the Treasury's gold supply to drop below $100 million. Overwhelmed, he turned to banker J. P. Morgan to bail out a lot of government bonds, which Morgan did twice. Many people criticized the President for apparently looking out for the money of the wealthy and not taking care of the suffering poor.

Meanwhile, American sugar planters in the Hawaiian islands overthrew Queen Liliuokalani and created the Republic of Hawaii. They petitioned the American government to annex them, but Cleveland realized the scheme that had taken place and refused. His immediate successor, William McKinley, would do so.

Cleveland retired to New Jersey after leaving office, preferring to remain out of the public eye, although he retained influence in the Democratic Party. He briefly reentered the national scene in 1904 when conservative Democrats tried to persuade him to run for a third term against Theodore Roosevelt; Cleveland, however, chose to remain in retirement rather than ending his career by losing to a popular incumbent.^note That year's Democratic candidate, Alton B. Parker, was a friend and protégé of Cleveland's who, indeed, lost to Roosevelt in a landslide. He died of a heart attack in 1908, his last words being, "I have tried so hard to do right."

Some claim that the "Baby Ruth" candy bar is not named after baseball star Babe Ruth, but after first daughter Ruth Cleveland, born between her father's first and second terms. However, since the candy bar was named "Baby Ruth" in 1921—17 years after Ruth Cleveland's death at the age of 12 and 24 years after Grover left the White House, but right at the time that Babe Ruth was rocketing to superstardom—it seems more likely that the Curtiss Candy Company was simply avoiding paying Babe Ruth royalties.

Grover Cleveland in fiction:

• Casey and Andy has him compete with Andy for the romantic attentions of Frances Folsom, who actually turns out to be Satan.
• American Dad! In the episode about the peanut brittle conspiracy, Stan refers to Grover as "America's greatest president". He left the peanut butter on George Washington Carver's doorstep.
• The Simpsons and Futurama writer Ken Keeler has apparently worked a joke referencing the fact that Grover served two non-consecutive terms into every show he has written for, for instance in "Two Bad Neighbors" (the one with George H. W. Bush):
  Abe: Grover Cleveland spanked me on two non-consecutive occasions.
  • When asked to explain why this trademark joke involving Cleveland was funny he replied, "Oh, it's not funny!" and then explained the facts about Cleveland for those not aware.
  • In the Futurama pilot, Fry and Bender visit the Hall of Presidents in the Head Museum. First there is Grover Cleveland's head, then Benjamin Harrison's head, then a second Grover Cleveland's head.
• In the TV reunion movie The Wild Wild West Revisited, Cleveland is one of a collection of world leaders suspected of being replaced with a robotic duplicate: "He looks like Grover Cleveland. He sounds like Grover Cleveland. He bumbles around ineptly like Grover Cleveland…"
• In an episode of Murphy Brown, Phil complains that George Bush and his entourage never stop by his restaurant while they're jogging. "What we need's another president like Grover Cleveland! Nice and fat and slow."
• The Disney film The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band is about a politically divided family during the 1888 presidential election. The family patriarch, played by Walter Brennan, is a hardcore Democrat who writes a campaign song for Cleveland, which we hear the family perform twice during the film.
• An episode of The Venture Bros. features a brief line referring to The Monarch acquiring "Grover Cleveland's Presidential Time Machine". To date, it has not been mentioned again since, but the show's creators are fond of revisiting that kind of thing.
  • It appears near the end of season 7 with little mention. A short time later a future Rusty and Billy emerge dressed as a RMS Titanic passenger and Confederate general respectively.
• In the "Super Trivia" episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Frylock has forcibly given Shake encyclopedic trivia knowledge, which he tests with this exchange:
  Shake: Who do you think you are?
  Frylock: I'm the only US President to serve two non-consecutive terms in the Oval Office.
  Shake: Then that would make you Grover Cleveland and… why is this comin' out of my mouth?!
• In It Happened in Athens, which is set at the Olympic Games of 1896, the cash-strapped American team briefly considers the feasibility of convincing President Cleveland to fund them. They're told that Cleveland can do nothing for them because he has a Republican Congress.
• In Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Space Ghost blasts Zorak repeatedly with his laser gauntlet, invoking a former President's name with every blast. Eventually, Moltar has to tell Space Ghost that he ran out of Presidents to name-drop, and that he invoked Grover Cleveland twice.
• Family Guy:
  • In a Cutaway Gag parodying Point Break (1991), Peter and his friends rob a bank while dressed as lesser-known Presidents; Cleveland was, of course, disguised as Grover Cleveland.
  • The real Grover Cleveland appears in a later episode to explain that he was the first President to get married in the White House. Lois finds the story sweet at first… but only until Cleveland elaborates that his wife was for all intents and purposes his adopted daughter. Stewie remarks that Cleveland probably won't be the subject of a Broadway musical.
• Archer: Cleveland is referenced in an X Called; They Want Their Y Back joke.
  Archer: Grover Cleveland called. He wants his watch back. … He left two non-consecutive messages.