Coolidge Without the Poetry
By John W. Childs
This review appears in the Winter 2024 issue of the Coolidge Review.
A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland by Troy Senik (Regnery History, 2022)
For years, Grover Cleveland languished in relative obscurity. But now Troy Senik has come along and rescued him from historical exile reserved for boring presidents.
Boring, as applied to U.S. presidents, basically means they were legislatively restrained, didn’t fight a war, and avoided most major scandals.
Thank goodness Cleveland fathered an illegitimate child and later wedded his ward, some twenty years his junior, or history might have overlooked him entirely.
He also remains the only president to serve nonconsecutive terms—first from 1885 to 1889, then from 1893 to 1897.
As far as memorable legislation goes, Cleveland was a complete bust. His signature legislative triumph was to lower tariffs—modestly, some seven points. That’s hardly something to set a historian’s heart racing.
But perhaps this misses an important point. Cleveland himself would have viewed the absence of transformative legislation as an accomplishment.
It reflected perfectly his view of the constitutional role of a president.
Presidential Restraint
When taking the oath of office, Grover Cleveland may have confused it with the Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm. Like Calvin Coolidge, he felt it was “more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.” This was reflected in, among other things, Cleveland’s unprecedented use of the veto. In his two terms, Cleveland vetoed 584 times, a record number until broken by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had three-plus terms to exceed it.
This record of presidential restraint has a lot to recommend it. Cleveland did no harm and passed on to his successors a country that was at least as healthy as the one he took over.
The same cannot be said of every president. As we contemplate $33 trillion in national debt, it is obvious some presidents didn’t get the message. One of the worst offenders was Lyndon B. Johnson, brilliantly chronicled by Amity Shlaes in Great Society. Too bad Johnson didn’t have Grover Cleveland around to advise him.
Presidential restraint is underrated, perhaps because it makes for boring history. But Cleveland had the great virtue of focusing on “serving the people,” not on creating legislative drama to excite some future historian.
Strike Breaker
As Senik emphasizes with great skill throughout the book, Grover Cleveland was a man of extraordinary character, highlighted by a nearly pathological devotion to hard work. That ethic, more than anything else, accounted for his unlikely success in politics. He simply outworked the competition.
Cleveland displayed an unbending sense of right and wrong. The fact that his father and brothers were men of the cloth may have accounted for this probity, though Cleveland was not notably religious himself. His righteousness led to political difficulties. Compromise was not part of his working vocabulary.
A case in point was his relationship with Tammany Hall, the somewhat unsavory Democratic machine in New York City. His almost rude rejection of the Tammany bosses’ patronage requests left him constantly skirmishing with a powerful faction of his own Democratic Party. A more flexible, dare we say more political, president would have found some modus vivendi as a matter of political self-interest. But not Grover Cleveland.
While memorable and transformative legislation was not his thing, he did take one bold, principled, and ultimately successful stand during his second term. During the severe recession of 1894, the workers at the Pullman sleeping car factory in Chicago went on strike. The strikers were soon backed by the American Railway Union and their energetic and ambitious leader, Eugene Debs. Violence erupted; railcars were overturned and rail routes blocked. Rail transport risked coming to a standstill.
One might have expected a proponent of presidential restraint like Grover Cleveland not to intervene. But Cleveland reasoned that he had both a legal justification and a constitutional obligation to ensure the preservation of interstate commerce. He said he asked himself, “Did the people elect Eugene Debs or Grover Cleveland president?” And with that he called out federal troops to quell the violence and effectively break the strike.
Cleveland issued a statement ordering all resistance to the troops to cease by noon the next day. He presented the statement as a “warning” intended to “protect and save the innocent.” The president explained, “Troops employed against such a riotous mob will act with all the moderation and forbearance consistent with the accomplishment of the desired end, but the stern necessities that confront them will not with certainty permit discrimination between guilty participants and those who are mingled with them from curiosity and without criminal intent.” Cleveland added, “The only safe course, therefore, for those not actually unlawfully participating is to abide at their homes, or at least not to be found in the neighborhood of riotous assemblages.”
The American public largely accepted Cleveland’s action and rationale, and the strike soon fell apart.
Cleveland’s success foreshadowed Calvin Coolidge’s handling of the Boston police strike twenty-five years later, though his words weren’t quite as eloquent as Coolidge’s. Each man intervened to break a strike and articulated his reasoning in a way that met with wide approval among the public.
In a rather drama-free presidency, this may have been Grover Cleveland’s finest hour.
An Unlikely President
In general, Senik does a good job of bringing to life the personality traits of this unlikely president. In some ways (perhaps not ethically!), Cleveland was like Richard Nixon in that his political success was a triumph of willpower and hard work over an absence of political aptitude, a quality so apparent in a Franklin D. Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan.
The one area where Senik falls short, in my perhaps nerdy opinion, is in failing to provide more economic context around Grover Cleveland’s recession. We don’t know what happened to economic growth or the stock market. The causes of the recession remain somewhat obscure. Was it the deflationary impact of Cleveland’s obsession with the gold standard or nosebleed-level tariffs? Who knows.
But otherwise the book does a fine job of describing a president whose lack of flamboyance would have stymied a lesser talent. Senik crafts a very readable story about a president who in many ways resembled Calvin Coolidge—without the poetry.
John W. Childs is the founder and chairman of J. W. Childs Associates, LP, a private equity and special situation investment firm.