The President Is a Sick Man

by Matthew Algeo

  Eugene V. Debs led the American Railway Union’s strike against the Pullman Company in 1894. President Cleveland’s heavy-handed reaction to the strike may have been due to the aftereffects of his operation. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  Disgruntled Pullman workers turned to Eugene Debs and his new American Railway Union for help. About four thousand of them joined the ARU. In May 1894, a delegation of workers called on Pullman and asked him to either raise wages or reduce rents. Pullman refused. And for good measure he fired three members of the delegation. The ARU responded with an ultimatum to Pullman: accept arbitration for our grievances, or we will strike. Again, Pullman refused.

  The strike began on June 26. ARU members nationwide refused to work on any train with a Pullman car. As Debs recalled,

  The switchmen, in the first place, refused to attach a Pullman car to a train, and that is where the trouble began; and then, when a switchman would be discharged for that, they would all simultaneously quit, as they had agreed to do. One department after another was involved until the Illinois Central was paralyzed, and the Rock Island and other roads in their turn.

  Within days, the strike spread to twenty-seven states and territories. More than one hundred thousand workers walked off the job. Rail traffic between Chicago and the West Coast was paralyzed. A labor revolt of this magnitude was unprecedented in American history. And it was also noteworthy for its lack of violence. On orders from Debs, the strikers were to remain orderly.

  The railroads were suffering incalculable losses, but they were intent on not only breaking the strike but on wiping out the ARU altogether. A federal investigation later concluded that the railroads were “determined to crush the strike rather than accept any peaceable solution through conciliation, arbitration, otherwise.” It would be, in the words of historian Allan Nevins, “a struggle to the death.”

  But in this struggle the railroads had an important ally: Attorney General Richard Olney. Before joining the Cleveland administration, Olney had worked for many years as an attorney for various railroads, including the New York Central and the Santa Fe. He could hardly be expected to be neutral in the dispute. And he wasn’t.

  Olney was known for his belligerence. His fits of rage made his subordinates in the Justice Department tremble. After his daughter had the temerity to marry a dentist—imagine!—he barred the couple from his home. The Pullman strike, Olney decided, must be “smashed,” and he would smash it with characteristic ruthlessness.

  The strike had interrupted mail delivery, which gave Olney the pretext he needed. Debs and three other union leaders were arrested for “conspiracy to interfere with interstate commerce,” and Olney obtained an injunction against the strikers. Claiming the country was on “the ragged edge of anarchy,” the attorney general also convinced President Cleveland to send federal troops to Chicago, ostensibly to restore order and protect the mail.

  Not that Grover needed much convincing. “If it takes the entire army and navy of the United States to deliver a postal card in Chicago,” the president bellowed, “that card will be delivered.” On July 4, 1894, thousands of troops from Fort Sheridan began marching into the city. Many Chicagoans assumed they were there for an Independence Day celebration. So much for the ragged edge of anarchy. Only after the troops arrived did the strike turn violent. Twelve people would die in clashes with the soldiers.

  Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld was a Democrat, and he had campaigned hard for Cleveland in 1892. But in a withering twelve-hundred-word telegram, Altgeld excoriated the president for sending in the troops:

  Surely the facts have not been correctly presented to you in this case or you would not have taken the step; for it is entirely unnecessary and, it seems to me, unjustifiable. Waiving all questions of courtesy, I will say that the State of Illinois is not only able to take care of itself, but it stands ready today to furnish the Federal Government any assistance it may need elsewhere. . . .

  As Governor of the State of Illinois, I protest against this, and ask for the immediate withdrawal of the Federal troops from active duty in this State.

  Grover responded curtly that “the presence of Federal troops in the city of Chicago was deemed not only proper, but necessary” to end “obstruction of the mails.” When Altgeld replied with another long telegram demanding the withdrawal of the troops, Grover hit his limit. “[I]t seems to me,” he wired the governor, “that in this hour of danger and public distress, discussion may well give way to active efforts on the part of all in authority to restore obedience to law and to protect life and property.”

  With Debs and other union leaders in jail, and federal troops in the streets, the Pullman strike collapsed. Debs was never convicted of the conspiracy charge, but he was found guilty of contempt for violating the injunction and sentenced to six months in prison. The American Railway Union collapsed, too. Its last national meeting was held in 1897.

  Debs emerged from prison thoroughly radicalized. He helped organize the Socialist Party of America and was its presidential candidate five times. In the 1920 presidential election he received more than nine hundred thousand votes. Six years later he died at the age of sixty-one.

  The Pullman strike coincided with the first anniversary of Grover’s secret operation, and it may have been one of those troubling things that he was now inclined to dismiss peremptorily. Before the operation, would he have acceded so readily to Olney’s desire to smash the strike? Would he have ordered the army into Chicago? Would he have rejected so blithely the objections of Governor Altgeld? The answers are unknowable, of course, but even Cleveland’s most sympathetic biographers believe he overreacted. The injunction, writes Allan Nevins, was “improperly drastic,” and “the order to send the troops into Chicago was premature.” In The Presidencies of Grover Cleveland, Richard E. Welch Jr. goes even further. “Cleveland,” Welch writes, “permitted the judicial and the military force of the federal government to be used in a manner that was of exclusive benefit to one party in a labor-management dispute.”

  The repeal of the Silver Purchase Act did not stanch the flow of gold from the U.S. Treasury, and by January 1894 the reserve had shrunk to just $65 million. Twice that year the government issued bonds to replenish the reserve, but the scheme backfired. Most people paid for the bonds by cashing in their silver certificates for gold. “Peter paid Paul,” one observer noted, “and the gold reserve was not increased in the process.” On January 1, 1895, the reserve stood at just $45 million. Desperate, Grover arranged for another bond sale. Only this time the bonds would be purchased by a syndicate that promised to pay $65 million in gold for them. The syndicate was headed by the financier J. P. Morgan, whom Grover had come to know while living in New York between his presidential terms. The two men met at the White House on the night of February 7, 1895, to hash out the transaction. Grover later insisted that Morgan was acting out of “clear-sighted, far-seeing patriotism.” “He was not looking for a personal bargain,” Grover told an interviewer, “but sat there, a great patriotic banker, concerting with me and my advisers measures to avert peril, determined to do his best in a severe and trying crisis.” The great patriotic banker made a killing on the deal. The syndicate turned around and sold the bonds on the open market for a profit of $7 million.

  In a sense, the deal worked. By June the Treasury’s gold reserve had once again topped the symbolically important $100 million mark. But the “Cleveland Depression,” as many had taken to calling it, still did not end, and Cleveland paid a steep political price for his bargain with Morgan. Coming just seven months after his heavy-handed intervention in the Pullman strike, the Morgan bond deal reinforced a growing perception that Grover Cleveland was merely a tool of rapacious capitalists—many of whom were now among his closest friends.

  Grover never seriously considered running for a third term in 1896. He felt bound by precedent. No president had ever served more than two terms. He was also exhausted. He’d lost sixty pounds, and he believed he might never recover from “the me
ntal twist and wrench” of his second term. He lived in fear that the cancer that had been removed on the Oneida would someday return, a fear compounded by the fact that he was a fifty-nine-year-old father of three small children—a third daughter, Marion, had been born at Gray Gables in 1895.

  Grover never would have won reelection anyway. Hundreds of thousands of destitute and hungry Americans blamed him for the depression and reviled him for his seeming indifference to their suffering. A nasty joke made the rounds: Grover comes upon a starving man eating grass in front of the White House and helpfully advises the man to go around to the backyard because the grass is taller there. Few presidents have left office as unpopular as Grover Cleveland. He was probably the most despised man in America. He received so many threatening letters that the number of police officers assigned to guard the White House was increased from two to twenty-seven. This further outraged many Americans, who saw no reason why their president should be surrounded by bodyguards like a king.

  By 1896 even his own party was repudiating Grover Cleveland. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, delegates hurled more insults at Grover than at Republican presidential nominee William McKinley. “You ask us to endorse Cleveland’s fidelity,” said good old Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman. “In reply, I say he has been faithful unto death—the death of the Democratic Party.” Tillman went on to condemn the Cleveland administration as “undemocratic and tyrannical.”

  The Democrats were hopelessly split between the goldbugs and the silverites. At the convention, the silver prophet William Jennings Bryan roused delegates with a scathing attack on the goldbugs: “Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”

  Bryan won the nomination, and the delegates adopted a pro-silver plank by the overwhelming vote of 628 to 301. The Democratic Party was now officially in the hands of the silverites, who would continue to fight for bimetallism. The party would remain fractured for a generation.

  Grover followed the convention from Gray Gables, where he was enjoying “first-rate” fishing on Buzzards Bay. He was not enjoying the updates coming from Chicago, however. Grover’s contempt for William Jennings Bryan was plain. He believed Bryan was a demagogue. “I cannot write or speak favorably of Bryanism.” Grover wrote a friend. “I do not regard it as Democracy.” To Grover, Bryan and his followers were “haphazard blunderbuss shooters.”

  Even in these trying times, however, Grover managed to maintain a modicum of good humor. On June 16, 1896, he wrote a letter to Kasson Gibson, the dentist who had fashioned his oral prosthesis. “This morning about an hour ago,” Grover wrote, “there came out of a tooth in my right under jaw, next to the dead tooth you fixed up, a piece of gold about the size of a pea. This indicates how completely I have been on the gold standard.”

  Chief Justice Melville Fuller administers the oath of office to William McKinley while outgoing president Grover Cleveland looks on, March 4, 1897. Cleveland was suffering from a severe case of gout that day and was barely able to stand. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  After the convention, goldbug Democrats nominated their own candidate for president, Illinois senator John Palmer. Grover voted for Palmer, and although McKinley easily won the election, Grover was not entirely displeased, for McKinley was a goldbug.

  While he was now free of cancer—for the time being, at least— Grover continued to be plagued by another infirmity with which he had struggled for years. On Inauguration Day 1897—Grover’s last day in office—his gout was so painful that he could barely stand. When McKinley called on him at the White House, Grover was limping heavily, and his foot was bandaged. As it had been four years earlier, the meeting of the incoming and outgoing presidents was amicable. Grover found McKinley to be “an honest, sincere, and serious man.” The two men shared a drink of rye whiskey before riding together in an open carriage to the ceremonies at the Capitol. The weather was clear and mild—what used to be called Cleveland weather.

  In the summer of 1897, less than six months after Grover left office, ships began arriving in West Coast ports with fantastic tales of huge gold deposits along the Klondike River in the Yukon Territory of northwestern Canada. Gold nuggets were said to be lying on the ground, just waiting to be collected by anyone willing to make the arduous journey to the region. Many were willing. Some forty thousand prospectors descended on the Klondike in the biggest gold rush in history. Many were motivated by sheer desperation. Eventually the Klondike would yield more than ten million ounces of gold, much of which found its way to the U.S. Treasury. This dramatically increased the country’s money supply, which, ironically, is exactly what the silverites had hoped to achieve all along. The Spanish-American War gave the economy another boost, and by 1900 the Cleveland Depression, which had begun with the Panic of 1893, had finally lifted.

  In 1900 Congress officially made gold the single standard of currency in the United States—though, owing to the Treasury’s vast silver reserves (accumulated partly as a result of the Silver Purchase Act), silver certificates continued to be issued and redeemable until the 1960s. FDR took the country off the gold standard in 1933, although technically the value of a dollar remained tied to gold through international treaties until 1971.

  On the recommendation of a friend named Andrew West, Grover retired to Princeton, New Jersey. He and Frances bought a big house, which they christened Westland in honor of their friend. The Clevelands had two more children in Princeton, both boys: Richard was born in 1897 and Francis in 1903.

  Grover had saved a small fortune by the time he left office, perhaps $300,000, but his advancing age and expanding family caused him to worry constantly about money. Ex-presidents did not receive pensions at the time, and Grover was anxious to “make everything snug” for his family before he died. He wrote a series of articles for the Saturday Evening Post and several other publications. For some he was paid as much as $2,500. Friends begged him to write his autobiography, but he demurred. “I want my wife and children to love me now and hereafter to proudly honor my memory,” he wrote one friend. “They will have my autobiography written on their hearts where every day they may turn the pages and read it.”

  On January 2, 1904, the Clevelands’ eldest child, twelve-year-old Ruth, came down with tonsillitis. On January 6 she was diagnosed with diphtheria. The next day she was dead. “It seems to me I mourn our darling Ruth’s death more and more,” Grover wrote on January 15. “So much of the time I can only think of her as dead, not joyfully living in heaven.” Grover and Frances could not bear the thought of returning to Gray Gables without Ruth, so they leased the property. The building was eventually turned into an inn and became a popular local restaurant. It was destroyed by arson in 1973. The crime is still unsolved.

  Grover working at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, 1906. In his retirement, the former president became a beloved figure in the town. The university awarded him an honorary degree, and students celebrated football victories by parading to his house. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  Much to his surprise and delight, Grover became a popular figure in Princeton. The university awarded him an honorary degree. Students serenaded him on his birthday, and football victories were celebrated with a parade to Westland, where Grover would appear on the porch to lead the school cheer. For Grover, who had been forced to forego college in order to support his family, his time in Princeton was deeply satisfying.

  In 1901 Grover was appointed a trustee of the university. It was in this position that he came to intimately know—and occasionally clash with—the university’s president, a sickly history professor named Woodrow Wilson. In 1912, Wilson would become the first Democrat elected president since Grover.

  In retirement Grover’s frosty relations with the press did not thaw. O
nce, when an aggressive reporter pressed him for his position on a particularly contentious issue, Grover declared, “That, sir, is a matter of too great importance to discuss in a five-minute interview, now rapidly drawing to its close.” He was an elder statesman now, but not all the rough edges from his salad days in Buffalo had been made smooth. He still “trimmed” his cigars by biting off the ends.

  In the spring of 1908 Grover’s health began to fail precipitously. He complained of stomach pains and was bedridden. At 8:40 on the morning of June 24, he died in his bed at Westland. He was seventy-one. Frances was at his side. His last words were: “I have tried so hard to do right.” Naturally, none of his lengthy obituaries mentioned the operation on the Oneida in 1893. It was still a closely guarded secret.

  Grover Cleveland was buried in Princeton Cemetery on June 26. His tombstone does not mention the fact that he was twice president of the United States. His grave is just a short walk away from the grave of the eighteenth-century theologian Jonathan Edwards—a collateral ancestor of E. J. Edwards.

  Grover survived fifteen years after his secret surgery. The cancer in his mouth never recurred, a fact that pleased Dr. William Williams Keen immensely. “That he should have survived after the removal of a sarcoma of the jaw without local recurrence for so unusually long a period was a great satisfaction to Dr. Bryant and his colleagues.” However, the exact nature of Grover’s final illness and the cause of his death are unclear. Biographer Allan Nevins believed Grover “was in the grip of gastro-intestinal disease complicated by ailments of the heart and kidneys.” On his death certificate the cause is listed as “heart failure complicated with pulmonary thrombosis and edema.” But Dr. John Erdmann, who had assisted in the operation on the Oneida, later told an interviewer that he believed Grover died from “an intestinal obstruction” and that a postmortem examination revealed “extensive carcinoma ... in the intestines.” The records from this examination have been lost, but if Grover did indeed have intestinal cancer, an interesting question is raised: Were the oral tumor and the intestinal tumor related? In other words, had the oral cancer finally metastasized as Grover long feared?