”Fairly good,” answered Lamont.
The president, of course, said nothing.
The Ruth docked at Gray Gables at four o’clock. Frances was waiting for her husband. “Mr. Cleveland,” one correspondent noted, “jumped onto the landing wharf with considerable agility and walked up the pathway to Gray Gables without assistance.”
The following day, Tuesday, July 11, Grover, again accompanied by Lamont and Bryant, rode a carriage into Bourne to pick up his mail at the town’s post office. That afternoon, the three men went fishing again, this time staying out almost until sunset. It’s likely that, by then, the president had been fitted with the prosthesis that allowed him to better enunciate. Kasson Gibson, the New York prosthodontist recruited by Bryant, had set up a makeshift dental laboratory in one of the rooms at Gray Gables. Gibson made a plaster cast of the hole inside the president’s mouth and used the cast to fashion a vulcanized-rubber device known as an obturator, which plugged the hole. “The vulcanite plate,” Gibson explained, “was made without teeth, gold clasping the cuspid tooth on the left, second bicuspid and molar on right, bridging across the opening, with a thick round edge where it came in contact with the cheek.” The obturator was instrumental in maintaining the secret. As Dr. W. W. Keen later wrote, “This supported the cheek in its natural position and prevented it from falling in. When it was in place, the president’s speech was excellent, even its quality not being altered.” However, Robert O’Brien, Cleveland’s private secretary, disagreed. “His voice was visibly affected in the opinion of those who heard him regularly,” O’Brien wrote many years later. In any event, Gibson earned high praise from the one person who mattered most: the patient. After Gibson sent the president a new prosthesis in October, Grover responded with a letter of thanks:
My dear Doctor,
I hasten to announce that you have scored another dental victory and a greater one than has before attended your manipulation of my corpus.
The new plate came last night. I looked at it quite askance—in point of fact with disfavor. I put it in this morning. It is now about 11 o’clock at night. I have worn it all day with the utmost ease and comfort without a shred of packing of any kind. I took it out to cleanse it after breakfast and lunch, but found very little on or behind it, that needed attention. My wife says that my voice and articulation are much better than they have been for a number of days. I have not had the plate out since dinner.
I feel very well as you may suppose over my new machine. The double-header, as I call it—the one you built up and afterwards cut down—I cannot make work very well, but the new one promises to be such a comfort that I expect to get on nicely with it and the old stand-by you first made . . .
Yours very sincerely,
Grover Cleveland
By Thursday, July 13, Grover had practically resumed his normal routine at Gray Gables: fishing, visiting friends, entertaining guests, sitting on the porch to imbibe the fresh sea air. He was seen in public with ever-increasing frequency. His sister, Mary Hoyt, left for her home in Nebraska that day. Dan Lamont left Gray Gables for New York the next day. Likewise, the reporters who had flocked to Buzzards Bay the previous week also began drifting home. Whatever had been ailing him, the president was clearly recovering nicely.
And so the questions about Grover’s health faded away. Even skeptics began to accept the assurances that he was in good health. “The president gained in strength rapidly enough to justify the most optimistic expectations of his physicians,” wrote Robert O’Brien.
Dr. Bryant also planned to leave Gray Gables, but when he examined the president around July 15, he discovered something that made him nervous. As he later wrote, “A suspicious looking growth [had] appeared at the inner margin of the wound which it was deemed wise should be removed for the sake of giving the patient the benefit of every doubt.” Bryant hastily reconvened the surgical team for a second operation on the Oneida. Drs. Erdmann, Janeway, Keen, and O’Reilly went to Elias Benedict’s Greenwich home, where they boarded the yacht in privacy. It is noteworthy that Dr. Hasbrouck was not asked to participate. It is possible that the second operation was performed entirely with a local anesthetic, such as a cocaine solution, making Hasbrouck’s expertise in general anesthesia unnecessary. But it’s more likely that Bryant, suspecting Hasbrouck was the source of the cancer rumors that began spreading soon after the first operation, no longer considered the dentist trustworthy.
The Oneida sailed to Gray Gables, where the president and Dr. Bryant boarded on the morning of Monday, July 17. Before embarking, Grover bade Frances an “affectionate adieu,” which, according to one report, caused “some of the wiseacres to predict that he is off for a long cruise.” The president, it was reported, “appeared in the best of health and spirits.” Reporters were informed that he was going on a fishing excursion for about two days.
That afternoon, while the Oneida cruised the waters of Buzzards Bay, Bryant “removed . . . the suspicious appearing tissue and re-cauterized the entire surface of the wound with the galvanocautery,” Dr. Keen later wrote, adding, “This operation was brief and the president recovered quickly.”
The doctors were put ashore at Newport the next night. The Oneida returned to Gray Gables the following day, July 19. Relaxing on the porch of the big gray house with Frances that evening, Grover appeared the picture of contentment and good health. The few reporters still covering the president never suspected a thing.
Still, Grover’s recovery was far from complete. On July 23, Charles Hamlin, a young Treasury Department official who later became the first Federal Reserve chairman, paid Cleveland a visit. Hamlin went to Gray Gables to deliver some statistics on the money question that Grover had asked him to prepare. “President appeared not well at all,” Hamlin wrote in his diary. “Had his mouth evidently packed with some kind of bandage—could not speak distinctly. Seemed to me to have some serious trouble with his mouth—looked thoroughly tired out.” However, Hamlin noted the president was at least well enough to have a “long talk” with him about the economy. Before leaving, Hamlin noted, he “saw also Mrs. C. and Ruth who gave me some flowers.”
While Cleveland was convalescing, the economy was not. On July 11, four more banks failed, including the Kansas City Safe Deposit and Trust Company, the largest savings bank in Missouri, and Thornton’s Banking House, which had been regarded as one of the strongest and safest banks in central Illinois. The Thornton’s failure left hundreds of farmers penniless. Two weeks later, the New York, Lake Erie and Western Railroad, better known simply as the Erie, went into receivership, sending stocks tumbling again. Under the deceptively bland headline “Trade Is Not Brisk,” the New York Times on July 29 listed business closings and layoffs that had been announced the previous day:
Six mills in Rhode Island closed
A mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, reduced to half time
A mill in Saco, Maine, closed
A mill in Bridgeport, Connecticut, reduced to half time
A factory in Wilmerding, Pennsylvania, cut wages by twenty percent
A steel mill in Pittsburgh closed, with 500 workers laid off
A mill in Harrisburg closed, with 400 workers laid off
A mill in Ishpeming, Michigan, closed, with 200 workers laid off Iron-ore mines in Tower and Ely, Minnesota, closed
A coal mine in San Antonio closed, with “a large number of men” laid off
And that was just one day. The panic had become, in the words of Henry Adams, a “financial storm . . . the most deep-seated and far-reaching in the history of the country.” In South Carolina, farmers were unable to sell cotton, simply because the buyers had no money to pay for it. In the upper Midwest, the Pillsbury flour mill purchased wheat with scrip, the equivalent of IOUs. The production of consumer goods, including musical instruments, furniture, jewelry, and clocks, plummeted or ceased altogether. Sales of horse-drawn carriages would never recover from the Panic of 1893. By the time the economy finally improved, carriages had
been supplanted by other forms of transportation, including urban mass transit and the automobile. Even distilleries were idled. “The entire trouble is that the people have no money to buy whiskey,” a St. Louis wholesaler lamented. Most alarmingly, the output of food for domestic consumption fell by 3.1 percent from 1893 to 1894, meaning many families went hungry. Overall, economists have estimated that the American economy operated at 20 to 25 percent below capacity during the panic.
There were no reliable unemployment statistics, so it is impossible to know exactly how many people were jobless that summer. But estimates range as high as three million nationwide—an unemployment rate of perhaps 20 percent. To get a handle on the problem, Montana created a Bureau of Agriculture, Labor, and Industry in 1893, the first state bureau of its kind. Other states soon did likewise.
Whatever the number of unemployed, it was, in the words of Charles Dawes, a Nebraska lawyer and future vice president, “appalling.”
To many, the growing number of gaunt tramps roaming the cities and countryside looking for work was alarming and frightening. In Kansas, Governor Lorenzo Lewelling ordered police to leave “law-abiding tramps” alone. But other states, including Maryland and Massachusetts, passed harsh new anti-vagrancy laws to crack down on the itinerant unemployed.
Some local governments tried to help the jobless. Boston paid unemployed men $1.25 a day to chop wood. Other cities followed suit. Public works projects were launched in Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, and St. Louis—the first major efforts at public works relief in a depression. But most government officials shared Grover’s opinion that the “lessons of paternalism ought to be unlearned.” The vast majority of relief efforts would be organized by private organizations, mainly churches and labor unions, which were strained to the breaking point by the task of caring for the numberless indigent.
With the special session on the Silver Purchase Act rapidly approaching, the goldbugs and the silverites girded for a battle that some believed would be more than metaphorical. Colorado’s pro-silver governor, Davis H. Waite, told a rally in Denver that “it is better, infinitely better, that blood should flow to the horses’ bridles rather than our national liberties should be destroyed.” (This earned Waite the alliterative, if unflattering, nickname Bloody Bridles.) Waite threatened “another revolution” if the law was repealed.
A Congregational minister in Denver said any member of Congress from the West who voted for repeal “should not be shot when he returned home, but should be put into a tank of kerosene and fire set to him.”
In Nevada a pro-silver group issued a statement accusing President Cleveland of using “intimidation and bribery and executive threats” to repeal the Silver Purchase Act. “The friends of silver . . . are energetically organizing for the conflict.”
So, too, were the friends of gold, who pointed out that the United States Treasury had purchased $147 million worth of silver—more than a third of the world’s output—since the law had passed, with no discernible economic benefit. Why buy more?
In an editorial entitled “What’s the Matter with Kansas?,” Emporia Gazette editor William Allen White mocked one silverite Kansan as a “shabby, wild-eyed, rattle-brained fanatic” and another as “an old human hoop skirt.” To the goldbugs, the silverites were rabble—and dangerously radical rabble at that.
It is hard for us to imagine today just how provocative the money question was in 1893. It was as divisive and vexing as any of today’s hot-button political issues—think gay rights and gun control. It permeated every nook and cranny of American culture, and, even more than a century later, the debate still reverberates, often in unexpected places.
In 1888, Lyman Frank Baum caught Western fever. Baum was a salesman from upstate New York who dreamed of striking it rich. So, like tens of thousands of other adventurous Americans, he headed west. Baum, his wife Maud, and their two children moved to Aberdeen, a small town in the Dakota Territory, in what would become the state of South Dakota the following year. He opened a general store called Baum’s Bazaar, where his customers, mostly farmers, bought everything on credit. But there was a terrible drought that year—and the next—and the farmers were unable to pay their bills. The store went bankrupt in 1890. Undeterred, Baum next tried his hand at Journalism. He took over a local newspaper called the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. The work suited Baum, who seemed to have a natural gift for writing. He enjoyed penning editorials, many of which had a decidedly liberal bent. One called for women’s suffrage, not a universally popular sentiment in South Dakota, where women would not win the vote until 1918. In another, nakedly racist, editorial, however, Baum called for the extermination of Native Americans. As a newspaperman, Baum must have followed the debate over the money question very closely.
The Saturday Pioneer proved enormously popular, but nobody in Aberdeen could afford to buy it—even at just five cents a copy—much less pay to advertise in it. The newspaper lasted barely more than a year before it went bankrupt like Baum’s Bazaar. Baum, by this time completely cured of Western fever, moved to Chicago, where he found a job working for the Evening Post. He had lived just three years in Aberdeen, but the experience left a deep impression on him, particularly the plight of the drought-stricken and deeply indebted farmers.
In Chicago, L. Frank Baum began writing children’s books in his spare time, meeting with some success. In 1900 he published his most famous: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Many scholars believe the book is an allegory for the money question, with a decidedly pro-silver bent. In Baum’s story, Dorothy wears silver shoes, not ruby slippers, as in the movie version. The Yellow Brick Road represents gold. Dorothy herself represents the archetypal American everyman. The Scarecrow is the farmer; the Tin Man, the Eastern capitalist greedy for oil; and the Cowardly Lion, a spineless politician. The good witches are from the North and the South. The wicked witches are from the East and the West. The word “Oz” itself can be interpreted as an abbreviation for ounces—as in gold and silver. Baum would always insist he’d written the story “solely to pleasure children,” but Oz became such a lucrative franchise that the author had no interest in politicizing it. In any event, the parallels are striking. As historian Gretchen Ritter writes, “Baum lived in the midst of a highly charged political environment and ... he borrowed from the cultural materials at hand as he wrote.”
If Grover Cleveland was the inspiration for the Cowardly Lion, L. Frank Baum never said as much. Throughout his medical ordeal, however, the president had shown himself to be anything but a coward.
Even in his incapacitated state, Cleveland understood the political math involved in repealing the Silver Purchase Act. There were 356 seats in the House and 88 in the Senate, so he needed 179 votes in the lower chamber and 45 in the upper to win repeal. And although his party— the Democrats—controlled both chambers, party lines in this debate were irrelevant. It was, as always, a sectional issue. Representatives and senators from the East were inclined to support repeal, regardless of party affiliation. Those from the South and the West were not.
As he recuperated at Gray Gables, Grover pondered the possible outcomes. In his papers is a list showing where he believed members of the House stood on the issue. By his reckoning, 173 representatives were for repeal, 114 were opposed, and sixty-nine were undecided: close, but still not enough votes to guarantee repeal. In the Senate, where the pro-silver states were disproportionately represented, the vote would likely be much closer.
On the afternoon of Friday, August 4, Grover left Buzzards Bay to return to Washington for the first time since his operation. While he traveled in relative luxury, the trip was grueling. From Gray Gables he took a carriage to Woods Hole, a train to Newport, a ferry to New York, a carriage across town to a ferry to Jersey City, a train to Washington, and, finally, a carriage to the White House, arriving on the afternoon of the following day. The trip was the president’s first conspicuous public appearance since the surgery, and at every stop his countenance was scrutiniz
ed for any sign of disease. On the whole, the verdict was positive. In Newport he was reported to be “looking well and not the least weary.” In New York he appeared “well tanned” and “seemed to be in perfect health.”
Two days later, on Monday, August 7, the special session convened. Congress received the president’s message the next day. Rather than delivering it personally, however, Cleveland had the speech read by clerks in each chamber. Both audiences listened “in dead silence.” Acknowledging that “distrust and fear [had] sprung up on every side,” Cleveland blamed the “unfortunate financial plight” on “Congressional legislation touching the purchase and coinage of silver by the General Government.” In other words: Congress, it’s your fault. Now fix it.
Had he ever served in a legislative body, Cleveland might have been more tactful. But he hadn’t, and the message harkened back to his days as Buffalo’s blunt “veto mayor.”
Yet the president’s message wasn’t completely intemperate: It did not even contain the inflammatory word “gold,” and, beyond repealing the Silver Purchase Act, Cleveland only urged Congress, obliquely, to “put beyond all doubt . . . the intention and the ability of the Government to fulfill its pecuniary obligations in money universally recognized by all civilized countries.”
Three days later, on August 11, a repeal bill was introduced in the House. And, on that same day, the president once again left the capital and returned to Gray Gables. Accompanied by Secretary Lamont, Grover slipped out of town on an early-morning train. As with his abrupt departure on June 30, his leaving was not discovered until he was already gone. The president left behind a statement explaining his sudden exodus, though it was not released until that afternoon.
I am going back to my summer home at the seashore because I am not sufficiently rested from the strain to which I have been subjected since the 4th of March to fit me again to assume the duties and labors which await me here. I have been counseled by those whose advice I cannot disregard that the further rest I contemplate is absolutely necessary to my health and strength. I shall remain away during the month of August, and shall devote myself to rest and outdoor recreation.
The President Is a Sick Man Page 12