Torn between two lives

Editor’s note: Marvin Olasky continues his monthly biographical series on key individuals from late 19th and early 20th century American history. In February and March, we looked at the life of John D. Rockefeller. This month we present Part 1 on the life of Grover Cleveland.

We rightly complain about Washington corruption now, but in the 1870s and 1880s, Mark Twain fricasseed the nation’s capital in The Gilded Age, and British observer James Bryce generalized that American politicians simply thought of high office “as a means of gain.” Reporters joked about Congressman “Pig-Iron” Kelley of Pennsylvania, who combined high tariff agitation with sexual prowling: “When he goes into society he backs women into corners and asks them their opinion of the duty on steel rails.”

Washington itself was growing. Sanitation improved, as open sewers and swamps were covered over and drained. Workmen put the finishing touches on the long-languishing Washington Monument. Capped off at 555 feet in 1884 and opened to the public in 1888, it was the tallest structure in the world, beating out the spire of the Cologne Cathedral by 43 feet.

By the 1880s, bathrooms in the Capitol actually had bathtubs, and an average of 50 congressmen each day bathed in nine tubs, some made of marble. Yet many journalists concluded they could not wash off the dirt that was a feature of political hog-trading run rampant.

Reporter Frank Carpenter wrote about thinly veiled ads in the Washington Star that suggested immorality in the houses just off the District’s broad avenues: “Wanted—By two sisters, two large unfurnished rooms, where no questions will be asked.” “Personal—A widow lady desires a gentleman to assist her financially.” “Wanted—Room for gentleman in home of a discreet young widow, where he can enjoy all the comforts of a home.” Carpenter and others yearned for a throwback president, a second George Washington, who could fight for both private and public virtue.

Ironically, the man who brought a sense of honor back into the national government, Grover Cleveland, knew from his own past about sexual arrangements such as those advertised in the Star, and the importance of avoiding them. Cleveland in many ways was not what he appeared to be. When citizens met him—280 pounds with brown hair, blue eyes, and a drooping brown mustache—they saw a slow-moving, bulky body and did not expect aggressiveness on the job. But Cleveland as mayor, governor, and then president typically worked every day except Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 or 2 a.m. (with time out only for ample meals) and was willing to make tough decisions every hour of the day. As president, he skipped Washington socializing and mothballed the Dispatch, the presidential yacht.

Cleveland had practiced being out of the swing of things while serving his apprenticeships as mayor of Buffalo and governor of New York. In Buffalo, because he stood against raids on the public treasury, he gained the nickname “Veto Mayor.” In Washington, opponents called him the “Veto President.” Cleveland’s political enemies taught their children to sing,

A fat man once sat in a President’s chair, singing Ve-to, Ve-to, Ve-to.
With never a thought of trouble or care, singing Ve-to, Ve-to. …

But if what Cleveland did during his six busy workdays did not trouble him, it was because on the seventh he worshipped at the First Presbyterian Church.

Such worship was crucial for Cleveland. He did not worship the doting grandfather god that was beginning to dominate some aspects of American Christendom. He also did not bow to the subjective self-selected god peeking out from the pages of theological tomes devoted to “higher criticism.” He worshipped the God of Scripture, saying, “The Bible is good enough for me, just the old book under which I was brought up. I do not want notes, or criticism, or explanations about authorship or origin.”

Cleveland believed in a Lord who proclaimed objective truth and challenged men to do their duty.

Cleveland believed in a Lord who proclaimed objective truth and challenged men to do their duty. He emphasized duty frequently in both his public pronouncements and private letters during the 1880s and 1890s: “We have not permitted duty to country to wait upon expediency. … I am sure I never was more completely in the right path of duty than I am now.” After leaving office in 1897, he wrote of his “consciousness of duty well and faithfully performed. Popular applause is, of course, gratifying; but there are times when a man’s own satisfaction with his conduct is a better criterion of real merit.”

That sensibility dominated Cleveland’s public policy work. His friend Richard Gilder explained that “the ‘preacher blood’ of the President has told in him more and more as his public and private responsibilities have increased.” Personal setbacks pushed Cleveland forward to an even greater sense of obligation. In 1893, when he fought off cancer by having his left upper jaw removed, Cleveland wrote to Thomas Bayard, ambassador to England, “I see in a new light the necessity of doing my allotted work in the full apprehension of the coming night.”

Choosing between the two ways

Cleveland was born on March 18, 1837, to a devout mother and a minister father. He later summarized his childhood years in central New York State, near Syracuse, by writing, “I was reared and taught in the strictest school of Presbyterianism.” Family devotions, Sunday school, and three church meetings on Sunday made up part of that strict school.

Young Cleveland studied the Westminster Shorter Catechism and found some of the memorization difficult, but as president he told reporters that he could recite it from beginning to end. He wryly commented, “those are not apt to be the worst citizens who were early taught, ‘what is the chief end of man?’” (The catechism answer is, “To glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.”)

Cleveland credited the “precious precepts and examples of my early days” for “every faculty of usefulness I possess, and every just apprehension of the duties and obligations of life.” As a teen he began taking a lively interest in political and ethical questions. Cleveland planned to go to college, but when he was 16 his father died and he needed to work to obtain money for himself and his family. In 1853 and 1854, Cleveland was an assistant teacher at the Institution for the Blind in New York City. Fanny Crosby, the blind writer of hymns such as “To God Be the Glory,” was another assistant. The job was hard but the location good for a young man exploring low-rent taverns (no proof of age necessary in those days) and torn between street life and higher callings.