COLUMN: Unlike Jefferson and Lincoln, Grover Cleveland gets no respect

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by Mike Nabavian

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This week I turn my attention to another great unheralded statesman, one who was all but ignored by history but who will someday, I believe, be ranked among the foremost American public servants of the nineteenth century. I speak of none other than President Grover Cleveland (1837-1908).

In the catalog of America's most celebrated Presidents, known to every schoolchild in this great nation, Cleveland's name is conspicuously absent.

Yet Thomas Jefferson, an unrepentant slaveholder and the leading villain in the Marbury v. Madison case, takes his place near the top of the list. So, too, does Andrew Jackson, an irascible roughneck of dubious morals. As for Abraham Lincoln, that mole-ravaged freak, I am entirely at a loss to account for his sparkling reputation. Why is it that our most venerable "historians," old codgers nestled snugly in their theoretical wonderlands, have seen fit to heap praise on these men?

When the task of chronicling history rests in the hands of such "intellectuals," with their ulterior socialist, communist, classicist, feminist, elitist, idealist, and humanist agendas, perhaps we should not be surprised that this absurd register of presidential heroes has been foisted upon us.

To be fair, though, Cleveland was probably doomed long before the historians got their hands on him. Popular accounts invariably conceal the fact that Knights of Labor leader Terrence Powderly was Cleveland's first great enemy. Powderly was a closet anarchist who secretly masterminded the bombing at Haymarket Square.

What was discussed in the more than 20 meetings that occurred between Powderly and Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky during the 1880s? Skeptics who insist that these meetings could never have taken place because Trotsky was not yet seven years old in 1886 conveniently ignore the fact that both Powderly and the leading Russian intellectuals of the decade had a common interest in showing Cleveland up as a weakling who couldn't maintain order.

In fact, a great many ideologues were threatened by Cleveland's grand vision of a peaceful world full of happy people. They knew all too well that Cleveland, a greater genius than any president since Monroe, was fully capable of carrying out such ambitious designs. It became a top priority among the president's enemies to put a stop to his agenda in its very earliest stages.

Efforts to portray Cleveland a "buffoon" with "no common sense" who would "foul up the country" were rightly dismissed as spiteful name-calling, and it seemed in 1887 that everything was working in the administration's favor. Had Cleveland's push for tariff reform succeeded at this time, two world wars and a depression might well have been averted. But it was not meant to be.

When labor leader and political innocent Samuel Gompers received an anonymous midnight telephone call requesting delivery of 1600 fine cigars, all imprinted with the slogan "Vote No on the Mills Bill," Cleveland's fate was sealed. The cigars were distributed on the Senate floor two days later; the first item in Cleveland's great agenda went down to a resounding defeat at the hands of a corrupt Congress. The anonymous caller was never identified, but it is worth noting that a young Eugene Debs skulked out of town shortly before the decisive vote, confiding to a friend once he reached Chicago, "We really did a number on Cleveland that time."

Powderly and Debs, along with the descendants of their followers and the followers of their descendants, have succeeded for nearly a century in denying Cleveland's name the recognition it deserves.

While it is true that a city was named in the former president's honor, and that President Cleveland was later fictionalized as the character Joe Christmas in Faulkner's Light in August , his critics are as strident today as they ever were. They dwell specifically on Cleveland's infamous misstep in the Pullman Strike of 1894, an action which Cleveland acknowledged he perpetrated while he was feeling "out of sorts."

If I may venture a personal opinion on Cleveland's critics, I hate them and wish they would go to hell. They have swallowed the historians' lie, blinding themselves to the great promise Cleveland would surely have fulfilled had it not been for his numerous enemies.

Grover Cleveland was a great American. It will be many years before we see his like again.

Michael Nabavian is a Sid Richardson College sophomore.

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the March 31, 1995 issue.

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