Unknown Presidents- Grover Cleveland. Cleveland was the 22nd president of the US. Here are a few facts about this little known president.
-Early Life & 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, a Presbyterian minister, and Anne Neal Cleveland. In 1841, the family moved to upstate New York, where Cleveland’s father served several congregations before his death in 1853.
Cleveland left school following his father’s death and started working in order to help support his family. Unable to afford a college education, he worked as a teacher in a school for the blind in New York City and then 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 firm in 1862. Cleveland did not fight in the American Civil War; when the Conscription Act was passed in 1863, he paid a Polish immigrant to serve in his place.
-Early Political Career
Cleveland’s first political office was sheriff of Erie County, New York, a position he assumed in 1871. During his two-year term, he carried out the death sentence (by hanging) of three convicted murderers. In 1873, he returned to his law practice. He was persuaded to run for mayor of Buffalo in 1881 as a reformer of a corrupt city government. He won the election and took office in 1882. His reputation as an opponent of machine politics grew so rapidly that he was asked to run as the Democratic candidate for governor of New York.
He is the only president to date who served two nonconsecutive terms, and also the only Democratic president to win election during the period of Republican domination of the White House that stretched from Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 to the end of William Howard Taft’s term in 1913. Cleveland worked as a lawyer and then served as mayor of Buffalo, New York, and governor of New York state before assuming the presidency in 1885. His record in the Oval Office was mixed. Not regarded as an original thinker, Cleveland considered himself a watchdog over Congress rather than an initiator.
-Presidency
FIRST TERM IN THE WHITE HOUSE: 1885-89
Cleveland won the Democratic 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 of Maine, was implicated in several financial scandals, while Cleveland was involved in a paternity case in which 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.
Once in office, Cleveland continued the policy of his predecessor, Chester Arthur, in basing political appointments on merit rather than party affiliation. He tried to reduce government spending, using the veto more often than any other president up to that point, 414 vetos. Cleveland was a noninterventionist in foreign policy and fought to have protective tariffs lowered.
In 1886, Cleveland married Frances Folsom, a student at Wells College in New York who was 27 years his junior. Although Cleveland was not the first president to marry while in office, he is the only one who had the ceremony in the White House. At age 21, Frances became the youngest first lady in U.S. history. The Clevelands would go on to have five children.
The tariff issue came back to haunt Cleveland in the presidential election of 1888. Former U.S. Senator Benjamin Harrison of Indiana won the election, in large part 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 home state of New York in that election. He returned to New York City and took a position in a law firm for the next four years.