President Grover Cleveland - Reunited One Country Again

Grover Cleveland (1837-1908), who served as the 22nd and 24th U.S. president, was known as a political reformer. He is the only president to engagement who served ii not-consecutive terms, and besides the but Democratic president to win election during the period of Republican domination of the White House that stretched from Abraham Lincoln'due south (1809-65) election in 1860 to the end of William Howard Taft'south (1857-1930) term in 1913.

Cleveland worked equally a lawyer and and so served equally mayor of Buffalo, New York, and governor of New York land before assuming the presidency in 1885. His tape in the Oval Role was mixed. Not regarded equally an original thinker, Cleveland considered himself a watchdog over Congress rather than an initiator. In his second term, he angered many of his original supporters and seemed overwhelmed past the Panic of 1893 and the depression that followed. He declined to run for a third term.

Early on Career

Stephen Grover Cleveland was born in Caldwell, New Jersey, on March 18, 1837. He was the fifth of nine children of Richard Falley Cleveland (1804-53), a Presbyterian minister, and Anne Neal Cleveland (1806-82). In 1841, the family moved to upstate New York, where Cleveland's father served several congregations before his death in 1853.

Cleveland left schoolhouse following his father'due south decease and started working in order to help support his family unit. Unable to afford a college education, he worked equally a teacher in a schoolhouse for the blind in New York City and so as a clerk in a law firm in Buffalo, New York. After clerking for several years, Cleveland passed the state bar examination in 1859. He started his own law house in 1862. Cleveland did not fight in the American Civil War (1861-65); when the Conscription Act was passed in 1863, he paid a Polish immigrant to serve in his identify.

Sheriff, Mayor and Governor

Cleveland's beginning political office was sheriff of Erie County, New York, a position he causeless in 1871. During his two-year term, he carried out the death sentence (by hanging) of 3 convicted murderers. In 1873, he returned to his law practise. He was persuaded to run for mayor of Buffalo in 1881 as a reformer of a decadent city government. He won the ballot and took office in 1882. His reputation as an opponent of automobile politics grew then rapidly that he was asked to run as the Democratic candidate for governor of New York.

Cleveland became governor in January 1883. He was so opposed to unnecessary government spending that he vetoed eight bills sent up by the legislature in his first ii months in office. Simply while Cleveland was pop with the voters, he made enemies inside his own party, specially the powerful Tammany Hall political machine in New York City. Nonetheless, he won the respect of New York state assemblyman and future U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) and other reform-minded Republicans. Cleveland was soon regarded every bit presidential cloth.

First Term in the White Business firm: 1885-89

Cleveland won the Autonomous presidential nomination in 1884 in spite of the opposition of Tammany Hall. The 1884 presidential campaign was ugly: Cleveland's Republican opponent, U.S. Senator James G. Blaine (1830-93) of Maine, was implicated in several financial scandals, while Cleveland was involved in a paternity example in which he admitted that he had paid child support in 1874 to a woman who claimed he was the father of her child. In spite of the scandal, Cleveland won the election with the support of the Mugwumps, Republicans who considered Blaine corrupt.

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Once in part, Cleveland continued the policy of his predecessor, Chester Arthur (1830-86), in basing political appointments on merit rather than political party affiliation. He tried to reduce government spending, using the veto more often than whatsoever other president upwards to that point. Cleveland was a noninterventionist in foreign policy and fought to have protective tariffs lowered.

In 1886, Cleveland married Frances Folsom (1864-1947), a student at Wells College in New York who was 27 years his junior. Although Cleveland was non the first president to marry while in role, he is the but one who had the anniversary in the White House. At historic period 21, Frances became the youngest outset lady in U.S. history. The Clevelands would go on to have five children.

The tariff result came back to haunt Cleveland in the presidential election of 1888. Old U.S. Senator Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901) of Indiana won the ballot, in large role because of heavy turnout by voters in the industrial states of the Northeast who saw their jobs threatened by lower tariffs. Cleveland even lost his domicile land of New York in that election. He returned to New York City and took a position in a law firm for the adjacent four years.

2nd Term in the White Business firm: 1893-97

Dissimilar the campaign of 1884, the presidential entrada of 1892 was quiet and restrained. President Harrison, whose married woman, Caroline Harrison (1832-92), was dying of tuberculosis, did not campaign personally, and Cleveland followed conform. Cleveland won the election, in office because voters had changed their minds almost high tariffs and also because Tammany Hall decided to throw its back up behind him.

Cleveland's second term, even so, opened with the worst financial crunch in the country'southward history. The Panic of 1893 began with a railroad bankruptcy in February 1893, followed quickly by bank failures, a nationwide credit crunch, a stock market crash and the failures of three more than railroads. Unemployment rose to xix percent, and a series of strikes crippled the coal and transportation industries in 1894. The American economic system did not recover until 1896-97, when the Klondike golden rush in the Yukon touched off a decade of rapid growth.

Cleveland was inconsistent in his social views. On the ane hand, he opposed discrimination against Chinese immigrants in the W. On the other hand, he did not support equality for African Americans or voting rights for women, and he thought Native Americans should assimilate into mainstream gild as speedily as possible rather than preserve their own cultures. He also became unpopular with organized labor when he used federal troops to trounce the Pullman railroad strike in 1894.

Cleveland was an honest and difficult-working president but he is criticized for being unimaginative and having no overarching vision for American gild. Opposed to using legislation to bring about social alter, he is best known for strengthening the executive co-operative of the federal government in relation to Congress.

Last Years

By the fall of 1896, Cleveland had get unpopular with some factions in his ain party. Other Democrats, yet, wanted him to run for a tertiary term, as in that location was no term limit for presidents at that fourth dimension. Cleveland declined, and former U.S. Representative William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) of Nebraska won the nomination. Bryan, who later became famous as an opponent of British naturalist Charles Darwin's (1809-82) theory of development, lost the 1896 election to Governor William McKinley (1843-1901) of Ohio.

After leaving the White House in 1897, Cleveland retired to his home in Princeton, New Jersey, and served as a trustee of Princeton University from 1901 until his death. He refused overtures from his political party to run again for the presidency in 1904. His health began to fail quickly at the terminate of 1907 and he died of a heart attack at the age of 71 on June 24, 1908. According to two of Cleveland'southward biographers, his last words were, "I have tried so hard to do correct."

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Source: https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/grover-cleveland

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