In his new biography, Troy Senik insists that though Grover Cleveland’s was not a “great presidency,” his subject is “one of our greatest presidents.” And it is the fundamental soundness of Cleveland’s character that goes a good deal of the way toward explaining why this might well be so.
A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland by Troy Senik (368 pages, Threshold Editions, 2022)
The most curiously compelling thing about this quite compelling biography of our twenty-second and twenty-fourth president is the opening line of most every chapter. So let’s begin with the very first line of the very first chapter: “H. L. Mencken could be a real pain in the a–.”
There are books that require a chapter or two before a reader finally commits to staying the course. There are other books, the subject matter of which doesn’t require a compelling opening line. There are still other books, in truth most books, that simply begin. And then there is this book, a biography of a long-forgotten Democratic president, who can easily be lost amid the shuffle of equally forgettable post-Civil War Republican chief executives. Rutherford B. Hayes or Benjamin Harrison, anyone?
Stephen Grover Cleveland, or “Big Steve” to his Buffalo, New York, saloon pals, could use a little opening boost. Or so biographer Troy Senik must have thought; hence the Mencken gambit. One line, and a potential reader might well be hooked.
Actually, Mr. Senik might have been up to two things at once here. After all, when it came to most every American president, including Washington and Lincoln, Mr. Mencken was a pain in the posterior. More than that, he could be a contemptuously snarky pain in the neck as well. For example, he once snarked that the trajectory of American presidents from Washington to Grant was alone enough to disprove Darwinian notions of evolutionary progress.
Mencken was especially contemptuous of our allegedly great presidents. The first Roosevelt was little more than a bouncer forever cleaning out barrooms, while the second Roosevelt’s conception of government was that of a “milk cow with 125 million teats.” Woodrow Wilson was a horror who took the country into an unnecessary war. He was followed by Warren Harding whose rhetoric reminded Mencken of college yells, stale bean soup and dogs barking through endless nights. Then came Calvin Coolidge (“If one could be a Coolidge fanatic one could be a fanatic for double entry bookkeeping”), who was followed by Herbert Hoover, who was nothing more than a “fatter and softer Coolidge.”
And on and on it went for all of our greater and lesser presidents—save for Cleveland, which brings us back to the other thing that Mr. Senik was up to with his opening line: When it comes to the Mencken treatment meted out to our various presidents, his assessment of Cleveland is the exception that proves the rule.
Almost immediately Mr. Senik proceeds to borrow from Mencken’s wonderfully titled essay on Cleveland, “A Good Man in a Bad Trade.” In fact, the title of the book is also borrowed from that essay. In it, Mencken conceded that the country has had “more brilliant” presidents than Cleveland, as well as “one or two who were genuinely profound.” But in his estimation there had been no president since Washington whose “fundamental character was… more admirable.”
Far from finished, Mencken thought that the fundamentals of the Cleveland character were best displayed in his dealings with his fellow politicians. He climbed the political ladder “not by knuckling under” to others in the trade, but by “scorning them and even defying them.”
And that climb was a rapid one indeed. Grover Cleveland went from mayor of Buffalo, New York (in 1881), to governor of the state (elected in 1882), to president of the United States as of March 4, 1885. Not until Jimmy Carter would we have a comparable rise from relative obscurity to the White House.
Mencken went on to speculate that Cleveland’s political success might have had something to do with his bearing. And yet there was “something more to him that beam and tonnage.” To be sure, he had his enemies, but when they tried to “have at him” they quickly discovered that his considerable weight was the least of their difficulties: “What really sent them sprawling was that everything about him seemed to be made of iron.” As a result, according to presidential hitman H. L. Mencken, the president who is Troy Senik’s “man of iron” managed to “sail through American history like a steel ship loaded with granite.”
There you have it, the Mencken-Senik iron man deserves mention “in the same breath” (Mr. Senik’s phrase) as George Washington himself. If a reader might be tempted to toss the book aside upon encountering such an over-the-top judgement, Mr. Senik is on hand on page two to tell us that “Mencken was right and the rest of us are wrong.”
That said—and it is a mouthful—Mr. Senik quickly adds that he is not about to claim that Cleveland’s was a “great presidency,” but he would insist that his subject is “one of our greatest presidents.” And it is the fundamental soundness of his character that goes a good deal of the way toward explaining why this might well be so.
What?!? The Grover Cleveland who hired a substitute to fight for him in the Civil War, and the Grover Cleveland who fathered a child out of wedlock is a man of sterling character? Mr. Senik thinks so. More than that, he makes the case that this was so.
In his early twenties when the Civil War began, Cleveland was the sole financial support for his widowed mother and younger siblings. Two older brothers had quickly enlisted. After a draft had been enacted, Cleveland’s number was among the first called. His choices were to serve, pay $300 or find a substitute. One of his brothers volunteered to return to service and take his place. Grover (or “Big Steve”) refused the offer and paid a Polish sailor $150 to serve for him.
The story of his relationship with one Marie Halpin is somewhat murkier. A love-child had been conceived sometime during his tenure of sheriff of Erie County, a tenure which included his personally carrying out two hangings. Both mother and father were then somewhere in the middle thirties. Apparently, neither had thoughts of marriage. Concerned about her drinking, Cleveland arranged to have the child placed in an orphanage. He also paid for the boy’s care and gave Halpin some money to start a new life in nearby Niagara Falls.
When the story became a political issue in the 1884 presidential campaign Cleveland, according to Mr. Senik, “responded not with a strategy but with a principle.” He telegraphed this to a campaign aide: “Whatever you do, tell the truth.”
Mr. Senik judges that Halpin “surely deserved better.” More than that, Cleveland’s interest in his son’s welfare was at best “distant” and little more than “contractual in nature.” All in all, the author concludes, in “no version of the story” is Cleveland a “hero.” Mencken long ago penned what was, shall we say, a rather more graphic defense of this particular example of Cleveland’s pre-presidential behavior: Having admitted that he had “diddled” her, Cleveland at least was willing to pay for the “little bastard.”
The chapter which contains the Halpin tale dwells on the larger story of the presidential campaign of 1884. Titled “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” (three very good things in their place—or so thought G. K. Chesterton when he learned of the Presbyterian minister’s charge against Cleveland’s Democratic party in that campaign), this chapter also has one of those page-turning Senik openers: “It was the most important night of Grover Cleveland’s life—and the phone was dead.”
The setting was the New York governor’s mansion, where on the evening of November 4, 1884, Grover Cleveland was awaiting election returns. It looked to be a close call, and “anxiety was running high.” It was also a “fitting end” to the entire affair, since the whole business of running for president had made Cleveland “miserable.”
The margin did prove to be razor-thin. Cleveland finished with 48.85% of the popular vote to 48.28% for Republican candidate James Blaine. The margin in the electoral college was more decisive: 219-182. But Cleveland carried New York and its 36 electoral votes by a bare 1,149 votes and Connecticut with its 6 votes by only 1,300. A swing (or better yet tilt) of fewer than 2,500 votes would have sent Big Steve home to Buffalo. As it happened, Mr. Senik tells us, Cleveland barely set foot in Buffalo ever again.
The bulk of this highly readable biography of this highly improbable president deals with Cleveland’s two presidencies, as well as his two post-presidencies. On the eve of detailing some of this bulk about our bulkiest of chief executives (save perhaps for William Howard Taft), Mr. Senik comes up with a line that captures Cleveland perfectly: “If he wasn’t a political genius, he had an incredible knack for stumbling into situations that made him look like one.”
Actually, something similar might be said about Cleveland and matrimony. At what is to date the only presidential nuptials ever conducted in the White House, the forty-seven year old Grover Cleveland married Frances Folsom, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of his deceased law partner. By all accounts, including Mr. Senik’s, Cleveland semi-stumbled into a genuine love match, which found him producing children into his early sixties. Among them was a son, Richard, who would serve as Whittaker Chambers’ lawyer a half-century later.
Rather than stumble through the highs and lows of the two presidential and two post-presidential careers of Richard Cleveland’s father, permit me to simply recommend this admirable book about an admirable American. In many respects, Grover Cleveland was virtually the last of a breed. And he was surely the last of the Democratic presidents of this breed.
Cleveland and his successor, Republican William McKinley, were the last of the pre-progressive era presidents. From George Washington to Theodore Roosevelt, every American president, including even Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln (both of whom Cleveland greatly admired), looked back to the Constitution, rather than forward to some combination of a permanently powerful president marching arm-in-arm with a permanently powerful central government.
To be sure, Cleveland’s understanding of the presidency did not prevent him from wielding the power of the veto pen. The same thing might be said of his political hero, Andrew Jackson. But Cleveland did Jackson a few better. In fact, he issued more vetoes in his first term than all of his twenty-one predecessors combined. Many of his vetoes were of Civil War pension bills. But the larger point stands: President Cleveland viewed himself as a steward of the people’s money.
One more opening line of one more chapter might clinch the point: “Every presidency is, at some level, music.” Where, pray tell, is Troy Senik going with this? Well, the biographer somehow intuits that Cleveland’s first term must have “felt a bit like a harpsichord recital: exacting, precise, and joyless.” It all had something to do with this president’s sense of duty, which to the author “bordered on an obsession” with his role as steward. Less clear—to Mr. Senik and to us—is whether this president was “actually enjoying any of it.”
This is not to suggest that this is a humorless book or that Cleveland was a humorless fellow. Not at all. Whether as Big Steve or as Grover Cleveland, he enjoyed life, including time spent in Buffalo saloons, and time spent fishing, if not necessarily time spent as president.
And yet it’s also worth remembering that Grover Cleveland is one of only three presidents who won the popular vote three times. Jackson and, of course, FDR were the other two.
Victory in 1892 quickly proved to be bittersweet. Awaiting a second Cleveland presidency was the economic collapse of the mid-1890s and the loss of 125 Democratic seats in the mid-term election of 1894. Also on the horizon was war with Spain, a war that Cleveland was determined to avoid—even to the point of reminding Congress that, while its members might vote for war, he as commander-in-chief might not send American troops to fight it.
Will we ever see his like again? Reading this book should surely prompt such questions. Should we see his like again? Mr. Mencken, Mr. Senik, and Mr. Cleveland would likely all agree.
This sound-money, small-budget, low-tariff president is likely spinning in his grave at the prospect of a $30 trillion national debt. To repeat, he was the steward-in-chief, not the spender-in-chief. Witness his first term veto of a bill to provide seed for drought-stricken Texas farmers. Then witness the lesson from his veto message: “I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution… the lesson should be constantly enforced that though the people support the government the government should not support the people.”
H. L. Mencken could not have said it better. Not that Mr. Mencken was right about everything when it came to Mr. Cleveland. As far he was concerned, Cleveland’s version of English was a “horrible example to the young.” All too often Cleveland’s verbiage “simply heaved—and panted—and grunted.” Beyond that, it “never edified and seldom roared.”
Here Mr. Senik begs to differ. Among the snippets of Cleveland speeches scattered through this volume is this little snippet from his speech at the dedication of the Statue of Liberty on October 28, 1886: “We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home; nor shall her chosen altar be neglected. Willing votaries will constantly keep alive its fires, and these shall gleam upon the shores of our sister republic in the east. Reflected thence and joined with answering rays, a stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man’s oppression, until Liberty enlightens the world.”
No heaving or panting here. And Troy Senik’s unMenckensque judgment on this Cleveland “grunt”: “Not bad for a beer-guzzling ex-hangman.”
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The featured image is the official gubernatorial portrait of New York Governor (and U.S. President) Grover Cleveland (1906 or before) by Eastman Johnson, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.