A bolt of panic shot through the old man.
While Grover Cleveland endeavored to project an air of vigor, other Americans were struggling with the urge to kill themselves. Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but anecdotal evidence suggests the suicide rate increased dramatically during the Panic of 1893. In May, the New York Tribune published an editorial entitled, “Epidemics of Suicide.” “During the last fortnight there has been an unusually heavy record of mortality from this cause in New York and Brooklyn,” the paper said. Noting that five cases had been reported just the day before, the Tribune speculated, “There must be something in the social environment and in the spirit of the times that serves to deepen the overshadowing gloom . . . and to inspire the suicidal impulse.”
“Suicides seem to be constantly on the increase,” the St. Paul Daily Globe noted in September. “The existing financial crisis has contributed largely to this increase.”
Hosea Perkins’s eldest son, Edwin, enjoyed life. Still a bachelor at forty-two, Edwin lived in Harlem, where he was a “conspicuous figure” and “kept very lively company.” He was said to possess “an impulsive, warm-hearted temperament . . . and fine literary abilities.” Edwin was a stockbroker, and he was well known on Wall Street. For several years he’d held a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, but in 1889 he traded it for one on the Consolidated Exchange. His timing couldn’t have been worse. Known as the Little Board, the Consolidated Exchange specialized in mining and oil stocks, nearly all of which tanked in the panic. Edwin suffered huge losses, and he was forced to borrow money from his father to fund his extravagant lifestyle.
Still, Edwin seemed to take his misfortune in stride. He visited his father on the evening of September 11. “He showed signs of being somewhat unbalanced,” the New York Tribune reported, “but his father did not think he was in serious trouble.” Later that night Edwin returned to his apartment in Harlem. He put on his best black suit and a pair of fancy dress gloves. He picked up his favorite cane, the one with the silver tip. And he slipped a small, .32-caliber pistol into his pocket.
He went back to his father’s house. Standing on the lawn, he raised the gun to his right temple and pulled the trigger. He left no note.
Moments after Hosea discovered his son dead on the lawn, the paperboy arrived with the morning paper. Hosea was kneeling beside the body, holding Edwin’s head on his knees. The boy helped Hosea carry the body inside the house. About thirty minutes later a policeman making his rounds was stopped by one of Hosea’s servants and informed of the shooting. The investigation was perfunctory. The coroner ruled the death a suicide, and at four o’clock that afternoon, Hosea was issued a permit to bury his son.
Hosea had no doubt that his son had killed himself over his financial problems. He said his son “had been affected by financial losses caused by the stringency in the money market.” A private funeral was held on September 14. Edwin was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery.
Certainly, Edwin Perkins was not the only businessman driven to suicide in 1893. On October 25, Nathan Strauss, the New York representative of Levi Strauss, shot himself in the head in his office. Strauss, who was Levi’s nephew, had reportedly suffered heavy losses in railroad stocks. No less tragic were the more humble suicides. John Baptist Dunne, a thirty-year-old bachelor despondent over losing his job as a clerk at American Express and unable to provide for his widowed mother, shot himself inside a Catholic church in New York after attending Mass on December 1.
The epidemic did not escape the notice of President Cleveland, who not only read of suicides in the papers but was also touched by the phenomenon, at least indirectly.
In the early afternoon of July 8, 1893, a fifty-year-old politician named Charles Perry walked into a Buffalo cemetery. Perry was from Mt. Morris, a western New York town about sixty miles east of Buffalo, so Grover must have known him fairly well. Perry was experiencing “financial difficulties,” and he’d told his family he was headed to Buffalo on business. Standing on the bank of a picturesque lake in the cemetery, Perry put the muzzle of a revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He fell into the lake but was quickly pulled out of the water by several alert groundskeepers. Amazingly, Perry survived. The bullet had passed through his upper jaw and exited his left ear, missing his brain completely. His poor marksmanship saved his life.
Of course, desperation did not always lead to attempts at self-destruction. More often it led to agitation and confrontation. Employers responded to the panic by laying off workers in droves and slashing the wages of those who remained. In the railroad, mining, and textile industries, wages fell by as much as 50 percent, while the workday was routinely lengthened from eight hours to ten. Workers had little recourse. Organized labor was anything but organized in 1893. A strike at a steel mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania, the previous year had been brutally crushed, leaving the movement demoralized. A hodgepodge of specialized unions competed with each other for pieces of a rapidly shrinking pie. For example, there were about eight hundred thousand railroad employees in the United States, of whom some 150,000 belonged to various unions: switchmen, engineers, firemen, conductors, station men, shop workers. Among these factions there was virtually no cooperation.
Eugene V. Debs thought there was a better way. The son of Alsatian immigrants who settled in Terre Haute, Indiana, Debs was the national secretary-treasurer of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. He believed all railroad workers should be “under one roof,” represented by a single union. So he started one. He quit the firemen’s union, and, at a meeting in Chicago on June 20, 1893—right around the time Grover’s tumor was first diagnosed—Eugene Debs organized the American Railway Union. Membership was open to anyone who worked for a railroad in any capacity outside management. (Well, anyone who was white. African Americans and other minority groups were excluded by the union’s executive board, despite Debs’s objections.) Even longshoremen and miners who worked for railroad companies were eligible, as were employees of companies that operated railroads on the side.
Debs made membership affordable. At a time when most unions charged dues of ten to twenty-five dollars a year, the ARU charged members less than two dollars. Despite massive layoffs in the industry, membership took off faster than the New York Central’s legendary Engine 999, the fastest steam locomotive in the world at that time, capable of speeds in excess of eighty miles per hour. Within a year, 150,000 workers would belong to the ARU—as many as had belonged to all the other railroad unions combined.
Bald and myopic, Debs did not cut an imposing figure. But he was fearless and beloved by the members of his union. “He was the bravest man I ever knew,” labor lawyer Clarence Darrow said of Debs. Darrow was deeply impressed by Debs’s personality. “There may have lived some time, somewhere, a kindlier, gentler, more generous man than Eugene Debs, but I have never known him.”
Nobody imagined it when the ARU was formed, but Eugene Debs and Grover Cleveland would eventually confront each other in what one paper would call “the greatest battle between labor and capital that has ever been waged in the United States.”
By the time the House voted to repeal the Silver Purchase Act on August 28, pro-silver senators knew they probably didn’t have enough votes to stave off repeal if the bill reached the Senate floor. So they hoped to kill it before it got there, in the eleven-member Finance Committee, where Chairman Daniel Voorhees would cast the deciding vote. Voorhees was the Indiana senator who generally supported the silver cause but who, in exchange for control of patronage in his home state, had promised President Cleveland that he would “recognize and justify, as far as may be in my power, the generous confidence and friendly regard you have extended to me.”
But if Voorhees betrayed them, the silverites had another, more drastic option. Unlike the House, the Senate had a tradition of “unlimited debate” that the silverites intended to exploit to the fullest if necessary. In other words, they would filibuster. Today a vote of three-fifths of the senators—sixty—invokes
cloture, bringing debate to an end; but at the time, there was no cloture rule in the Senate. Each senator was allowed to speak as long as he wished. As long as the silverites could keep talking, the Senate couldn’t vote on repeal. One pro-silver senator predicted he and his like-minded colleagues could hold out for six months—which, of course, would be six more months during which the Treasury would be required to purchase 4.5 million ounces of silver. Senator Isham Harris of Tennessee promised to filibuster “till Hell froze over.”
The silverites also had a valuable ally in Vice President Adlai Stevenson, who, as president of the Senate, would preside over the debate. If, as expected, he was sympathetic to the silverites, the filibuster theoretically could last indefinitely. At the very least it might force the goldbugs to compromise.
Hanging over the debate was the specter of President Cleveland’s demise. If, as E. J. Edwards had just reported, Cleveland’s body had been invaded by “that dread and mysterious enemy which physicians scarcely dare to name,” it was possible that Adlai Stevenson would ascend to the presidency, in which case the special session would be rendered moot. Stevenson would never sign a repeal bill.
The silverites lost the first round when the Finance Committee voted to send the bill to the full Senate for consideration. As expected the vote was six to five, with Daniel Voorhees casting the decisive vote. He had kept his promise to the president. For that, the silverites vilified Voorhees as a Judas, though the senator, unlike the apostle, did it for gold, not silver.
The Senate debate over repeal would eventually fill five volumes of the Congressional Record with twenty million words, which, if written on a single line, would have stretched the sixteen hundred miles from Wall Street to Colorado’s silver country. Emotions ran high. Colorado senator Henry Teller broke down in tears at his desk. On several occasions opposing senators nearly came to blows. During an especially longwinded speech, Nebraska senator William Allen was interrupted by Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts.
”The Senator from Nebraska said a while ago that there was no overproduction,” Hoar said. “Does he not regard his speech as an instance of overproduction?”
Allen apparently couldn’t take a joke. “The question is too insulting for me to answer!” he thundered in reply.
Though outnumbered, the silverites were entrenched and refused to allow the debate to end. It became an endurance contest. During one stretch, the Senate was in session for thirty-eight continuous hours. With a sympathetic Adlai Stevenson wielding the gavel, William Allen managed to speak for fifteen hours straight at one point, though he spent much of that time reading books aloud.
The debate also exposed how fundamentally undemocratic the United States Senate can be. The four senators from Colorado and Nevada represented fewer than five hundred thousand people, while New York’s two senators represented six million. The New York World wondered how it was democratic for one-sixtieth of the population to thwart the will of the other fifty-nine sixtieths. It was an exaggeration, but the paper had a point. When an official from the New Mexico Territory met with President Cleveland to make the case for statehood, the president was unmoved. “If that Territory be admitted,” Cleveland said, “it will bring to the Senate two more free silver Senators.”
On Saturday, October 21, a weary group of Democratic senators from both sides of the issue proposed a compromise: the Silver Purchase Act would be repealed, but not until July 1, 1894, more than eight months hence. They presented the proposal to Cleveland, who angrily rejected it. He insisted he would only sign a bill that repealed the act entirely and immediately. There would be no compromise.
Cleveland’s stand broke the filibuster. The silverites realized their cause was hopeless, and their ranks began to crack. On the morning of Tuesday, October 24, Fred Dubois, a pro-silver senator from Idaho, glumly told reporters: “The jig is up.” One newspaper facetiously reported that Isham Harris, the senator who had promised to filibuster until hell froze over, “had his skates on ready to take advantage of the freshly formed sheet of ice.”
That afternoon, Senator John P. Jones of Nevada took the floor and quietly announced to a hushed chamber that “it is not the intention of anyone connected with this discussion to prolong it any more than is necessary to give his views fully to the Senate and to the people of the country.” It was the white flag of surrender.
The final vote would not come until October 30: forty-eight to thirty-seven in favor of repeal. The Senate filibuster had lasted sixty-two days. It still stands as one of the longest filibusters in Senate history, eclipsing even the fifty-seven-day filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
For procedural reasons, the bill went back to the House, which formally ratified it two days later, on November 1. The bill was then rushed to the White House. Cleveland, still very much alive and well, signed it into law at four thirty that afternoon by simply writing in the lower left corner of the document, “Approved, Nov. 1, 1893. Grover Cleveland.” The bill was law. The Silver Purchase Act was repealed.
“The outcome of the fight is a great personal victory for President Cleveland,” the Washington Post said.
The battle had been won.
Alas, the war would not be. The repeal of the Silver Purchase Act did not, as Grover had hoped, restore confidence in the economy. It was too little, too late. The panic did not end. By one estimate, unemployment stayed above 10 percent for the next five years—the longest stretch of double-digit unemployment outside the Great Depression. What was needed was a radical overhaul of the nation’s financial system, including aggressive governmental oversight. A commission investigating labor unrest at the time faulted the government “for not adequately controlling monopolies and corporations, and for failing to reasonably protect the rights of labor to redress its wrongs.” A rudimentary public welfare program would have been helpful as well.
In other words, what was needed was the kind of interventionist “paternalism” that Grover instinctively abhorred.
Although Dr. Bryant had pronounced Grover “all healed” on September 1, in some ways the president never fully recovered from his ordeal on the Oneida. It is true that the wound inside his mouth healed with noteworthy rapidity. In 1897, the dentist Kasson Gibson made another cast of Grover’s mouth to fashion a new prosthesis. It showed the defect had shrunk from 63.5-by-20.6 millimeters to 17.5-by-11.1 millimeters in the four years since the operation, a reduction that many doctors today find remarkable.
These casts of Grover’s mouth were made by the dentist Kasson Gibson shortly after the operation in 1893 (left) and again in 1897 (right). The shrinking of the operative defect is indicative of the remarkable healing that occurred in that time. NEW YORK ACADEMY OF MEDICINE LIBRARY
Yet Grover was never quite the same after the operation. He was thinner, and he tired easily. He complained of a constant earache— possibly because his uvula was displaced as a result of the operation. And his already legendarily short temper grew even shorter. Cleveland’s biographers have tended to minimize the impact of the operation on the remainder of his presidency, but it may have affected his judgment. Before the operation he made decisions only after careful deliberation. Afterward he acted much more rashly. His private secretary, Robert O’Brien, believed the operation “very greatly influenced Mr. Cleveland’s mentality.”
“He was a considerably different man in the years that followed,” O’Brien said. “He worried more easily and was more sensitive. It was a disturbing period in our economic history and he was disturbed by it.”
According to O’Brien, after the operation Grover had a tendency to “dismiss things that troubled him rather peremptorily.” As an example of this disposition, O’Brien cited an incident involving a group of suffragist women who were holding a conference in Washington. Some of the women requested a meeting with the First Lady. Frances passed the letter along to O’Brien, instructing him to ask the president how it should be answered. Grover, it should be noted, was not sympathetic t
o the cause of woman’s suffrage. (Neither was Frances, for that matter.) When O’Brien approached the president, Grover “did little more than shake his head.” All he said was: “Do not receive them.” When Grover’s name was mentioned at the conference, there was a storm of hisses that only Susan B. Anthony herself was able to calm.
Grover’s tendency to dismiss troubling things peremptorily may have also exhibited itself in far more serious ways—as when he clashed with Eugene V. Debs and the American Railway Union.
In the summer of 1893, George Pullman began laying off workers and cutting wages at his factory outside Chicago. Pullman’s Palace Car Company manufactured luxury rail cars. Its workers were compelled to live in a town called Pullman, which the company owned lock, stock, and barrel. The workers paid their rents to Pullman. They bought their groceries, water, and gas from Pullman. To some it was a “model town.” To others it was more like a feudal system out of the Middle Ages, an example of “corporate despotism.”
Between July 1893 and July 1894, the Pullman Company reduced its workforce from fifty-five hundred to thirty-three hundred, and the remaining workers saw their pay reduced by as much as 50 percent. Yet dividends still rose from $2.52 million to $2.88 million. And Pullman refused to lower the rents in the company town, even though they were as much as 25 percent higher than in neighboring communities. Lowering the rents, Pullman later said, “would have amounted to a gift of money to these men; it was simply a matter of business.” By early 1894, many workers were on starvation wages. It was estimated that, after the rent and other fees were paid, a typical worker had just six dollars a week left over to feed and clothe his family. Some had mere pennies.
The President Is a Sick Man Page 18