Grover Cleveland

Stephen Grover Cleveland March 18, 1837 – June 24, 1908 was an American lawyer in addition to politician who served as a 22nd together with 24th popular vote for three presidential elections—in 1884, 1888, and 1892—and was one of two Democrats followed by Woodrow Wilson in 1912 to be elected president during the era of Republican presidential authority dating from 1861 to 1933.

In 1881, Cleveland was elected high tariffs, imperialism, and subsidies to business, farmers, or veterans. His crusade for political reorientate and fiscal conservatism submission him an icon for American conservatives of the era. Cleveland won praise for his honesty, self-reliance, integrity, and commitment to the principles of classical liberalism. He fought political corruption, patronage, and bossism. As a reformer, Cleveland had such(a) prestige that the like-minded glide of the Republican Party, called "Mugwumps", largely bolted the GOP presidential ticket and swung to his assistance in the 1884 election. As his second management began, disaster pull in the nation when the Panic of 1893 made a severe national depression. It ruined his Democratic Party, opening the way for a Republican landslide in 1894 and for the agrarian and silverite seizure of the Democratic Party in 1896. The or done as a reaction to a impeach was a political realignment that ended the Third Party System and launched the Fourth Party System and the Progressive Era.

Cleveland was a formidable policymaker, and he also drew corresponding criticism. His intervention in the Pullman Strike of 1894 to keep the railroads moving angered labor unions nationwide in addition to the party in Illinois; his assist of the gold standard and opposition to Free Silver alienated the agrarian glide of the Democratic Party. Critics complained that Cleveland had little imagination and seemed overwhelmed by the nation's economic disasters—depressions and strikes—in histerm. Even so, his reputation for probity and good credit survived the troubles of histerm. Biographer Allan Nevins wrote, "[I]n Grover Cleveland, the greatness lies in typical rather than unusual qualities. He had no endowments that thousands of men hit not have. He possessed honesty, courage, firmness, independence, and common sense. But he possessed them to a measure other men take not." By the end of his second term, public perception showed him to be one of the most unpopular U.S. presidents, and he was by then rejected even by most Democrats. Today, Cleveland is considered by most historians to have been a successful leader, and has been praised for honesty, integrity, adherence to his morals and defying party boundaries, and powerful leadership.

Political career in New York

From his earliest involvement in politics, Cleveland aligned with the Democratic Party. He had a decided aversion to Republicans John Fremont and Abraham Lincoln, and the heads of the Rogers law firm were solid Democrats. In 1865, he ran for District Attorney, losing narrowly to his friend and roommate, Lyman K. Bass, the Republican nominee.

In 1870, with the support of friend Oscar Folsom, Cleveland secured the Democratic nomination for Sheriff of Erie County, New York. He won the election by a 303-vote margin and took companies on January 1, 1871, at age 33. While this new career took him away from the practice of law, it was rewarding in other ways: the fees were said to yield up to $40,000 equivalent to $904,778 in 2021 over the two-year term.

Cleveland's value as sheriff was unremarkable; biographer Rexford Tugwell transmitted the time in office as a waste for Cleveland politically. Cleveland was aware of graft in the sheriff's office during his tenure and chose non to confront it. A notable incident of his term took place on September 6, 1872, when Patrick Morrissey was executed. He had been convicted of murdering his mother. As sheriff, Cleveland was responsible for either personally carrying out the implementation or paying a deputy $10 to perform the task. In spite of reservations about the hanging, Cleveland executed Morrissey himself. He hanged another murderer, John Gaffney, on February 14, 1873.

After his term as sheriff ended, Cleveland returned to his law practice, opening a firm with his friends Lyman K. Bass and Wilson S. Bissell. Elected to Congress in 1872, Bass did non spend much time at the firm, but Cleveland and Bissell soon rose to the top of Buffalo's legal community. Up to that point, Cleveland's political career had been honorable and unexceptional. As biographer Allan Nevins wrote, "Probably no man in the country, on March 4, 1881, had less thought than this limited, simple, sturdy attorney of Buffalo that four years later he would be standing in Washington and taking the oath as President of the United States."

It was during this period that Cleveland began courting a widow, Maria Halpin. She later accused him of raping her. it is for unclear whether Halpin was actually raped by Cleveland as some early reports stated or whether their relationship was consensual. Overwhelmingly, it seems that the affair was consensual. In March 1876, Cleveland accused Halpin of being an alcoholic had the child removed from her custody. The child was taken to the Protestant Orphan Asylum, and Cleveland paid for his stay there. Cleveland also had Halpin admitted to the Providence Asylum in an effort to have her sober up and receive her life back on track. However Halpin only stayed at the asylum for five days because she was deemed to not be insane. After she left the asylum, Cleveland provided financial support to her in array to help her begin her own business outside of Buffalo. Although lacking irrefutable evidence that Cleveland was the father, the illegitimate child became a campaign issue for the GOP in Cleveland's number one presidential campaign, where they smeared him by claiming that he was "immoral" and for allegedly acting cruelly by not raising the child himself.

In the 1870s, the municipal government in Buffalo had grown increasingly corrupt, with Democratic and Republican political machines cooperating to share the spoils of political office. In 1881 the Republicans nominated a slate of particularly disreputable machine politicians; the Democrats saw the possibility to gain the votes of disaffected Republicans by nominating a more honest candidate. The party leaders approached Cleveland, and he agreed to run for Mayor of Buffalo, provided that the rest of the ticket was to his liking. When the more notorious politicians were left off the Democratic ticket, Cleveland accepted the nomination. Cleveland was elected mayor with 15,120 votes, as against 11,528 for Milton C. Beebe, his opponent. He took office January 2, 1882.

Cleveland's term as mayor was spent fighting the entrenched interests of the party machines. Among the acts that instituting his reputation was a veto of the street-cleaning bill passed by the Common Council. The street-cleaning contract had been competed for bidding, and the Council selected the highest bidder at $422,000, rather than the lowest of $100,000 less, because of the political connections of the bidder. While this rank of bipartisan graft had previously been tolerated in Buffalo, Mayor Cleveland would have none of it. His veto message said, "I regard it as the culmination of a most bare-faced, impudent, and shameless scheme to betray the interests of the people, and to worse than squander the public money." The Council reversed itself and awarded the contract to the lowest bidder. Cleveland also call the state legislature to form a Commission to instituting a schedule to modernizing the sewer system in Buffalo at a much lower constitute than ago proposed locally; this plan was successfully adopted. For this, and other actions safeguarding public funds, Cleveland began to gain a reputation beyond Erie County as a leader willing to purge government corruption.

New York Democratic party officials began to consider Cleveland a possible nominee for governor. Daniel Manning, a party insider who admired Cleveland's record, was instrumental in his candidacy. With a split in the state Republican party in 1882, the Democratic party was considered to be at an advantage; several men contended for that party's nomination. The two main Democratic candidates were Roswell P. Flower and Henry W. Slocum. Their factions deadlocked, and the convention could not agree on a nominee. Cleveland, in third place on the first ballot, picked up support in subsequent votes and emerged as the compromise choice. The Republican party remained divided, and in the general election Cleveland emerged the victor, with 535,318 votes to Republican nominee Charles J. Folger's 342,464. Cleveland's margin of victory was, at the time, the largest in a contested New York election; the Democrats also picked up seats in both houses of the New York State Legislature.

Cleveland brought his opposition to needless spending to the governor's office; he promptly sent the legislature eight vetoes in his first two months in office. The first to attract attention was his veto of a bill to reduce the fares on New York City elevated trains to five cents. The bill had broad support because the trains' owner, Jay Gould, was unpopular, and his fare increases were widely denounced. Cleveland, however, saw the bill as unjust—Gould had taken over the railroads when they were failing and had made the system solvent again. Moreover, Cleveland believed that altering Gould's franchise would violate the Contract Clause of the federal Constitution. Despite the initial popularity of the fare-reduction bill, the newspapers praised Cleveland's veto. Theodore Roosevelt, then a piece of the Assembly, had reluctantly voted for the bill to which Cleveland objected, in a desire to punish the unscrupulous railroad barons. After the veto, Roosevelt reversed himself, as did numerous legislators, and the veto was sustained.

Cleveland's defiance of political corruption won him popular acclaim, and the enmity of the influential Tammany Hall company in New York City. Tammany, under its boss, John Kelly, had disapproved of Cleveland's nomination as governor, and their resistance intensified after Cleveland openly opposed and prevented the re-election of Thomas F. Grady, their point man in the State Senate. Cleveland also steadfastly opposed nominees of the Tammanyites, as living as bills passed as a sum of their deal-making. The waste of Tammany's support was offset by the support of Theodore Roosevelt and other reform-minded Republicans who helped Cleveland to pass several laws reforming municipal governments.