The President Is a Sick Man

by Matthew Algeo

  Of course, Western silver mining interests didn’t mind a little inflation. Nor did Southern and Midwestern farmers, who, after a string of poor crops, were heavily in debt. Now the money they paid their bills with was worth less than the money they’d borrowed. The “cheaper” money made it easier for them to pay their creditors. If you’re in debt, inflation is good. If you’re a lender, not so much.

  And the lenders, by and large, were Eastern bankers and businessmen, who liked to call themselves “sound money men.” They blamed silver—and the inflation it caused—for the nation’s economic woes and their own diminishing fortunes. They wanted silver demonetized again and the nation categorically returned to the gold standard.

  As new and larger silver veins were discovered, the financial situation deteriorated precipitously. While the value of silver to gold was set by law at sixteen to one, by the early 1890s the real value of silver to gold had plummeted to something closer to thirty-two to one. And, since silver certificates could be redeemed for either metal . . . well, you didn’t have to be J. P. Morgan to figure out that you could double your money by exchanging fifty cents’ worth of silver for a dollar in gold. It was legislated alchemy. Inevitably, the Treasury’s gold supply began to dwindle, and, in April 1893, just a month after Cleveland began his second term, it dipped below the hugely symbolic $100 million mark for the first time; the panic that was gripping the nation only heightened.

  The money question divided the nation more bitterly than any issue since slavery. It pitted Eastern “goldbugs” against Southern and Western “silverites.” In pro-silver Kansas there was even talk of secession.

  Compounding the financial crisis was a speculative bubble: railroads. Between 1870 and 1890, the number of miles of rail lines in the United States doubled to more than 120,000, while the population grew just 63 percent. The industry was hopelessly overbuilt. As a result, the railroads’ freight charges plummeted—as did their profits. The Reading was only the first major railroad to go belly up in 1893. By the end of the year, the Erie, the Northern Pacific, the Union Pacific, and the Santa Fe would all collapse. In all, 119 railroads perished in 1893, and countless businesses that depended on those railroads simply vanished.

  Grover Cleveland was a sound money man through and through, and he believed the only way to save the economy was to put the nation squarely back on the gold standard. “Manifestly nothing is more vital to our supremacy as a nation . . . than a sound and stable currency,” he declared in his second inaugural—”a sound and stable currency” being code words for the gold standard.

  Cleveland blamed the poor economy on the Silver Purchase Act, the law that required the government to purchase 4.5 million ounces of silver every month. He believed the act not only drained the government’s gold reserves, it also undermined public confidence in the economy.

  Cleveland had decided he would call a special session of Congress for the purpose of repealing the Silver Purchase Act. It only remained for him to decide when.

  A political showdown was imminent.

  On the day after his inauguration, Grover Cleveland got down to business. His office was on the second floor of the White House, over the East Room. He sat behind a thirteen-hundred-pound oak desk made from the timbers of the British warship Resolute.* The working arrangements were, according to Cleveland’s private secretary Robert Lincoln O’Brien, “of unbelievable simplicity.” The president’s entire staff comprised “seven white men, one white woman, and three colored messengers.” The White House itself, O’Brien remembered, was “a Noah’s Ark of every type of cockroach and water bug known to science.”

  But rather than tackling infinitely more momentous matters like the crumbling economy on his first full day back in office, Cleveland was instead forced to deal with that scourge of nineteenth-century presidents: office seekers.

  After President James Garfield was assassinated by a proverbial disappointed office seeker in 1881, Congress passed the Pendleton Act, which established the Civil Service Commission and began requiring some applicants for government jobs to pass written examinations demonstrating their abilities. But the law initially covered only a very small number of jobs. Even by the time Cleveland began his second term in 1893, civil servants filled just a quarter of the government’s two hundred thousand jobs. The rest were still good-old-fashioned patronage jobs, to be filled as Cleveland chose. Cleveland supported civil service reform, but he was also a pragmatist. As the new party in power, Democrats were eager for their share of the spoils. Besides, patronage was a potent political weapon. Cleveland could grant or deny the power of patronage to members of Congress as he saw fit—and he would grant it only to those who promised to vote to repeal the Silver Purchase Act. About two weeks after taking office, Cleveland reached an agreement with Daniel Voorhees, a silver-leaning senator from Indiana and the chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee. The president gave Voorhees complete control of patronage in Indiana. In a letter to Cleveland dated March 20, Voorhees promised to return the favor. “You have indeed made me very deeply and permanently your debtor,” Voorhees wrote, “and it will be one of the principal pleasures and purpose of my life, and at every opportunity, to recognize and justify, as far as may be in my power, the generous confidence and friendly regard you have extended to me.”

  Office seekers besieged President Cleveland, and rising unemployment only added to the crush. The boldest simply strolled through the front door of the White House, climbed a staircase covered with a threadbare carpet, and took a seat outside the president’s office, in a crowded waiting room where the only diversion was a water cooler with an old jelly jar for a glass. Many applicants came armed with letters of recommendation from their congressmen. Each would be granted “an instant” to make his case, according to one observer. “Patiently listening to each request and making perfunctory response, the president then received the next and then the next, and no man of all that number who thus met him knew whether his plea had met with favor or refusal.”

  At times, the situation was farcical. Once, Vice President Stevenson called the Treasury to complain about an appointment, only to be told that he had written a letter of recommendation for the appointee. Unperturbed, the vice president admonished the department to ignore his written recommendations—only verbal recommendations were to be considered.

  “The dreadful, frightful, damnable office seeking hangs over me, surrounds me,” Cleveland lamented. It was, he said, a “nightmare.” Yet, to some extent, he had only himself to blame. Other presidents routinely delegated the task of doling out jobs, especially the lesser posts, but Cleveland found it impossible to delegate authority. As his friend and erstwhile Democratic presidential candidate Samuel Tilden once noted, Cleveland was “the kind of man who would rather do something badly for himself than to have somebody else do it well.” So Cleveland reviewed every application personally, even for the lowliest small town postmaster. More than a month after he started his second term, an acquaintance opined that the president had not been able “to give a moment’s thought” to the money question because of the office seekers.

  Meanwhile, the economy was only getting worse. On May 4, the National Cordage Company went bankrupt. The rope maker had once been a darling of investors. Just four months earlier it had paid a whopping 100 percent dividend. In reality, though, the company, like the railroads, was fatally overextended and deeply in debt. Its collapse sent Wall Street into another tailspin.

  The next day, according to the New York Times, the floor of the stock exchange “might have passed for a morning in Bedlam.”

  That same day, May 5, Cleveland noticed for the first time a rough spot on the roof of his mouth. It was near his molars on the left side— his “cigar chewing side.” He assumed it was nothing more serious than a minor dental problem, and given all he had on his plate at the time—the panic, the money question, the office seekers, Frances’s pregnancy—it’s hardly surprising he chose to ignore it. Accounts differ as to
whether the spot was painful, but by mid-June it had grown so large that it began to worry the president deeply. As Frances recalled many years later, it “often caused him to walk the floor at night.” When Frances inspected the spot, she saw what she described as a “peculiar lesion.”

  Joseph Decatur Bryant was a prominent New York surgeon and Grover Cleveland’s close friend. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE

  “I was alarmed when I saw it,” Frances later wrote, “and felt that Dr. Bryant who was our dear loyal friend and guide in all things medical should know it at once.” Dr. Bryant was Joseph Decatur Bryant, a prominent New York surgeon and the Cleveland family’s physician.

  “I wish very much to speak to you,” Frances wrote Bryant in a letter sent special delivery on Sunday, June 18, “especially about something that the President has on the roof of his mouth.” She requested that they meet the next day at the railroad depot in Jersey City, New Jersey, where Frances would be stopping on her way from Washington to Gray Gables, the Clevelands’ summer home on Cape Cod.

  “Of course the request from Mrs. Cleveland was heeded,” Bryant later wrote, “and from her something of the physical characteristics of the growth and her great anxiety regarding it were ascertained.” Bryant agreed to go to Washington to examine the president.

  Meanwhile, the White House physician, an army doctor named Robert M. O’Reilly, had already inspected the president’s mouth. O’Reilly, who had been alerted to the lesion by the president’s dentist, expressed “deep concern” over what he saw. He scraped a specimen and, without identifying the patient, sent it to the army laboratory for analysis. The pathologist there, Dr. William Welch, later remembered how he was told that “it was the most important specimen ever submitted for my examination and ... to use the utmost diligence and skill.” Welch, who suspected the specimen might have come from the president, determined that it was probably from a case of epithelioma, known today as squamous cell carcinoma.

  In other words, a malignant tumor.

  Dr. Bryant arrived in Washington on Thursday, June 22, and examined the president early the next morning. The physician saw “an ulcerated surface with an oval outline about the size of a quarter of a dollar extending from the inner surfaces of the molar teeth to within a quarter of an inch of the median line of the roof of the mouth and encroaching somewhat on the anterior part of the soft palate.” One of Bryant’s specialties happened to be oral tumors, and what he saw concerned him greatly. “To one familiar with the macroscopical appearances of epithelial growths,” Bryant wrote, “no reasonable doubt could exist in his mind regarding the certainty of the malignant nature of this.” (Epithelial cells are those that cover the surfaces and cavities of the body.)

  “What do you think it is, Doctor?” Grover asked after the examination.

  “It is a bad looking tenant,” Bryant answered. “Were it in my mouth I would have it removed at once.”

  ______________

  * The president’s residence would not come to be commonly known as the White House until Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency (1901—1909).

  * The behemoth desk was a gift from Queen Victoria to President Hayes in 1880 and has been used by nearly every president since.

  2

  BIG STEVE

  GROVER CLEVELAND never gave much thought to his ancestry. He was, he once wrote, “very busy in an attempt to fulfill the duties of life without questioning how I got into the scrape.” But his pedigree was more distinguished than he probably even knew. His great-great-grandfather and his great-grandfather, both named Aaron Cleveland, were famous Protestant ministers in colonial New England and New York. The younger Aaron’s grandson, Richard Cleveland—Grover’s father— was born in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1804. After graduating from Yale in 1824, Richard moved to Baltimore, where he studied theology. It was there that he met Ann Neal, the pretty daughter of a bookseller named Abner Neal. They were married in 1829.

  Like his illustrious ancestors, Richard pursued a career in the pulpit. Unlike them, he found little success. He was never called to a prestigious church, and he never rose to a high position in his profession. Not a single word of any of his sermons was recorded for posterity. Some believed he was too humble for his own good. “He didn’t have push enough,” remembered one relative.

  In November 1834, Richard Cleveland was called to serve as the minister at the Presbyterian church in Caldwell, New Jersey, about fifteen miles outside New York City. On March 18, 1837, Stephen Grover Cleveland was born in the Caldwell manse. Named for Stephen Grover, Richard’s predecessor in the Caldwell pulpit, he was Richard and Ann’s fifth child. Four more would follow. In 1841, Richard was called to Fayetteville, a small town near Syracuse in upstate New York.

  Chubby, with bright blue eyes and light brown hair, Steve Cleveland was a friendly child who loved outdoor pursuits—swimming and fishing in the summer, hunting and sledding in the winter. According to neighbors he was “chuck full of fun,” and not averse to occasional pranks, such as ringing the school bell in the middle of the night. In the classroom, he distinguished himself by hard work, not brilliance. “He considered well, and was resourceful,” his sister Mary remembered, “but as a student Grover did not shine.” In the words of his biographer Allan Nevins, young Steve was not—and never would be—a great intellectual force.

  Money was tight in the Cleveland household, where there were eleven mouths to feed on a minister’s salary. Young Steve did his part by working odd jobs. Fayetteville was near the Erie Canal, and when one of the village’s lime quarries needed an empty barge, Steve would hail one and direct it to the quarry, a service for which he was reimbursed ten cents. To preempt competitors, Steve rose at four in the morning.

  On October 1, 1853, when Steve was sixteen, his father died of peritonitis, an abdominal infection. Ann was left to care for the four youngest children. It was incumbent upon Steve to help support the family, and collecting dimes for hailing barges would not suffice. Later that fall, he abandoned his studies and moved to New York City, where he taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography at the New York Institute for the Blind. The institute was archetypically Dickensian, cold and dreary, with dreadful food and a loathsome headmaster named T. Colden Cooper. The 116 unfortunate inmates, ranging in age from eight to twenty-five, had been remanded there, often involuntarily, by county officials throughout the state.

  In the fall of 1854, Cleveland quit his job at the institute, presumably without regrets. The following May, when he was eighteen, he went seeking fame and fortune in one of the boomtowns of the burgeoning Midwest: Cleveland, Ohio, a city that had been founded by a distant relative named Moses Cleaveland (supposedly, a mapmaker’s error resulted in the spelling discrepancy). But he only made it as far as Buffalo, where he visited an uncle named Lewis Allen, who offered him room, board, and ten dollars a month to work on a Shorthorn cattle herd book that Allen was compiling. Steve accepted the offer.

  Founded around 1800, Buffalo was a young city when Cleveland arrived. The children of its first white settlers still walked the streets, and they remembered well how the British had burned the city to the ground during the War of 1812. After the Erie Canal was completed in 1825, Buffalo became a boomtown, for it was where the canal joined the Great Lakes. From crops headed east to heavy equipment going the other way, everything passed through Buffalo. Between 1830 and 1860, the city’s population grew tenfold, from eight thousand to eighty thousand.

  And, like most boomtowns, it was a pretty wild place, teeming with brothels, saloons, and gambling halls. An old canalhand named E. E. Cronk later estimated that “sixty percent of the buildings on both sides of Canal Street from Erie Street to Commercial were houses of prostitution, thirty percent were saloons, and ten percent grocery stores, etc.”

  Not surprisingly, it was a dangerous place, too. Police patrolled Canal Street in threes: one in front, two in back. When the canal was dredged every spring, it wasn’t unusual for eight or more human bodies to be discovered.<
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  The canal itself was a frothing, stinking bouillabaisse of garbage, human and animal waste, agricultural and industrial runoff, and offal, not to mention the human corpses. The effluent occasionally produced giant methane bubbles that rose to the surface and exploded, unleashing a stench so foul it sickened some people for days. Disease was rampant. Periodic outbreaks of typhus, typhoid fever, and smallpox killed hundreds annually.

  Yet, for all its faults—and there were many—Buffalo was also an exciting, vibrant, bustling place, filled with limitless opportunities for a young man with dreams and potential. There were fortunes to be made. You could have some fun there, too. One can imagine eighteen-year-old Stephen Grover Cleveland strolling down Canal Street’s wooden sidewalks for the first time, smelling the fetid canal, hearing the beckoning calls of the ladies of the evening and the rollicking piano music emanating from the saloons. It must have enthralled the minister’s son from Fayetteville. He resolved to stay in Buffalo.

  Steve ended up living with his uncle and working on the herd book for a year. In his spare time he went fishing on the Niagara River, picked cherries in his uncle’s orchard, and attended a fair in Utica. He also met some of his uncle’s influential friends, including Henry W. Rogers, a principal in the prominent Buffalo law firm of Rogers, Bowen, and Rogers. Rogers was impressed by Steve and offered him a position at the firm as an office clerk. In his spare time, Steve would be allowed to study law in the firm’s library; in essence, he would teach himself how to be a lawyer. This practice, called “reading law,” was how lawyers often were trained until law schools became common in the 1890s. On Steve’s first morning at the firm, Rogers tossed a copy of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the young man’s desk and told him dryly, “That’s where they all begin.” When the partners went out for lunch later that day, they forgot about Steve and locked him in the office. “Someday I will be better remembered,” he promised himself.