The Soul of Integrity
GRAFF, HENRY F.
The Soul of Integrity An Honest President: The Life and Presidencies of Grover Cleveland By H.Paul Jeffers Morrow. 387 pp. $27.00. Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor emeritus of...
...Remarkably, at the age of 49 President Cleveland married 21 -year-old Frances Folsom in the only Presidential wedding ever held at the White House...
...Only the faithful believe Ronald Reagan and George Bush weren't actually feigning ignorance when they claimed not to know about the Iran-contra scandal...
...The country has long put honesty at the top of its expectations for the performance of public duty...
...In departing, the winsome young First Lady promised the White House staff that the Clevelands would soon be back...
...Nor did he enjoy public speaking, let alone the stem-winding oratory still in vogue...
...First, Cleveland has been treated exhaustively by previous biographers, particularly Allan Nevins, whose classic Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage, merited a Pulitzer prize in 1932...
...After the existence of baby Oscar Folsom Cleveland was disclosed by a Buffalo newspaper during the Presidential campaign of 1884, he instructed his handlers to "tell the truth...
...Her first baby carriage was a gift from him...
...Examples abound: Jimmy Carter once had his staff make a list of his 1976 campaign pledges, probably painfully aware that he could not keep them all...
...I do not believe," he declared in explanation, "that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit...
...He concealed a potentially fateful cancer operation on the inside of his mouth and jaw that was not revealed to the public until many years after his death in 1908...
...May God palsy the brain that conceived it...
...his supporters picked them up from his repetitious and not very charismatic utterances...
...He ran his office efficiently, spending much of his time sitting behind a desk piled high with papers he felt he must deal with...
...His principled position deserved accolades, but there is no monument to it anywhere...
...During the Civil War he felt he had to buy a substitute to serve the Union cause...
...Cleveland's legacy is mixed...
...It was William Jennings Bryan who rose to succeed him in the Democratic Party's leadership...
...This was amply demonstrated by his stern handling of the Pullman strike in 1894...
...That is a fair description of Cleveland, but it becomes instantly an unfair judgment on other Presidents...
...The nation also has a more specific requirement that its leaders not put their hands in the public till or open themselves to bribes...
...When the United States got caught up in thejingoism of the 1890s that placed it in the ranks of the colony-owning nations, he remained adamantly on the sidelines with the anti-imperialists...
...He was defeated for re-election in 1888 by the even more colorless Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, despite receiving 100,000 more popular votes than his rival...
...Second, neither Cleveland Administration offers much in the way of excitement...
...Cleveland was an anachronism by the time his second term was over...
...Unbeknown to the public, only part of the truth came out: He was merely one of several men who had flings with Maria Halpin, the mother, but being the sole bachelor among them he took responsibility for the boy and supported him...
...These are quite plainly ambition and avarice...
...Although the colorless, overstuffed Chief Executive made tongues wag (when he ran for re-election, some sensationalist newspapers reported that he was given to beating his wife), he was the dominant Democratic Party figure for 12 years...
...Cleveland might have placed the onus on Oscar Folsom, his carousing late former law partner...
...Against the wishes of the Governor of Illinois, where the crisis was playing out, he sent in Federal troops to quell the violence...
...Fortunately for him, he came to prominence before the development of halftone illustrations that would have spread his picture wide on the pages ofthe country's newspapers...
...Without discussing it, Jeffers uses the classification "honest" in his title in its ordinary sense, meaning guided by an unyielding moral compass...
...In both cases the usage of the word suggests simply a general trustworthiness...
...Indeed, if he is remembered at all by the public at large it is for having served nonconsecutive terms, making him the 22nd and 24th President...
...While Jeffers doesn't see it as such, even Cleveland's tenure included a notable instance of dissembling...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt solemnly assured the nation that American boys would not be sent into a foreign war when he knew he could not make good on that guarantee...
...The adoption of Franklin's proposition would have meant the President must be rich, someone who could withstand the second of "two passions that have a powerful influence on the affairs of men...
...It hardly mitigated the effects of the President's misstep that thereafter half of the newspapers in the country ridiculed the general as "Fairchild of the Three Palsies...
...and may God palsy the tongue that dictated it...
...Yet the 41 men who have served the country as President have all been clean-handed, and, despite Franklin's fear, Americans are confident that the position has never been a place for illegal personal enrichment...
...The commander of the GAR, Lucius Fairchild, a hero-general of the Battle of Gettysburg, excoriated the President memorably at a rally in New York: "May God palsy the hand that wrote that order...
...Cleveland was a loner with only three years of political experience—as Mayor of Buffalo, then as Governor of New York —when he was elevated to the White House in the election of 1884...
...Whether it was his or not remains open to question...
...Jeffers does not deal substantially with his subject's four years out of office (1889-93...
...Cleveland's habit of blunt advocacy or opposition, though, is a scathing commentary on different kinds of White House dishonesty: spinning, outright lying and unkept promises...
...Besides raising the wrath of Civil War veterans by vetoing pension bills he deemed unworthy, he refused Federal assistance to drought-stricken Texas farmers...
...But he had an important private reason for not doing so: He was paying court to Folsom's widow and young daughter Frances...
...His social life, moreover, had apparently been confined to the saloons of Buffalo...
...Soon afterward he issued an order (later rescinded) calling for the Confederate flags taken in battle to be returned to Southern states...
...And it was Bryan who began the long process of creating a new political culture full of programs and crusades— with catchy names that would require for success more than simple honesty...
...Cleveland's operating motto was "a public office is a public trust...
...Cleveland also accepted the fatherhood of a child born out of wedlock...
...H. Paul Jeffers must be admired for taking his subject on, for at least two reasons...
...In short, Cleveland was an "honest man," allowing not even party allegiance to stand in the way of what he believed...
...As an administrator in the sense of offering vibrant leadership through plans and programs, he was a cipher...
...And so they were, in 1893, for a second term...
...Matters became worse in the eyes of veterans when, as President, he went fishing on Memorial Day, then a new holiday to honor the Civil War dead...
...But it has to be assumed that Cleveland's association with the law firm of Bangs, Stetson, Tracy and McVeigh, which represented the XP...
...He treated the Presidency as if the holder were supposed to be an impartial umpire...
...Morgan interests, contributed further to his conservatism...
...But this made him anathema to the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the mighty veterans organization that was veritably an arm of the Republican Party...
...Shy with women of his own class and standing in Buffalo, he had had his eye on Miss Folsom from the day she was born...
...Standing foursquare against the corruption of Tammany Hall and the malfeasance of public officeholders, he enjoyed a reputation as the very soul of incorruptibility...
...A limited man, he had never been in Washington until he arrived there as President-elect...
...Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor emeritus of history, Columbia...
...He was known as "Grover the Good" (Jeffers' referring to him as "Grover" throughout the book, however, seems both annoyingly patronizing and insincerely familiar...
...I have always felt embarrassed to know that when William Howard Taft rode down Pennsylvania Avenue with Wilson on the august occasion of Wilson's inauguration in 1913, their brief conversation included Taft's confiding to his successor that he had been able to save $ 100,000 out of his salary as Chief Executive...
...He did not press those words on the electorate...
...A cigarsmoking, beer-swilling man weighing more than 300 pounds, he did not cut a graceful figure...
...Franklin's idea found no takers...
...In a famous exhortation, George Washington entreated his troops before the Battle of Long Island in 1776: "Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.' Four years later John Adams famously inscribed on a mantel in the State Dining Room of the White House words that every President since him has read: "May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof...
...two of his brothers were serving and he was at the time caring for his widowed mother and two younger sisters...
...In an era seeking an end to corruption in high places, and increasingly aware that the newly industrialized nation required competence in the government bureaucracy, Cleveland's public integrity overrode his personal eccentricity...
...Two other episodes in Cleveland's life caused outrage and scandal, but in both cases he was trying to do the right thing...
...In the election of 1916, less than six months before the country was preparing to deploy its sons in France, Wilson permitted himself to be billed as the man who "kept us out of war...
...He devoted an entire State of the Union message to the hardly sexy theme of lowering the tariff (Congress rejected his appeal...
...Benjamin Franklin may have had dishonesty of that sort in mind when he argued in his single carefully wrought proposal at the Constitutional Convention that the President should not be provided a salary...
...editor/The Presidents: A Reference History" ALTHOUGH Grover Cleveland was the only Democratic president between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson to be re-elected, he has never been an American hero...
...the love of power and the love of money...
Vol. 83 • September 2000 • No. 4
