Grover Cleveland, who served as both the twenty-second and the
twenty-fourth president of the United States, dominated the
American political scene from 1884 to 1896. Viewed at one time as a
monument of presidential courage, Cleveland has over the past
generation been dismissed by historians as a "Bourbon Democrat,"
the symbol of that wing of the Democratic party devoted to
preserving the status quo and protecting the interests of the
propertied. In this revisionist study, Richard Welch takes a fresh
look at the Cleveland administrations and discovers a man whose
assertive temperament was frequently at odds with his inherited
political faith.
Although pledging public allegiance to a Whiggish version of the
presidency, Cleveland's aggressive insistence on presidential
independence led him to exercise increasing control of the
executive branch and then to seek influence over Congress and
national legislation. Quick to denounce governmental paternalism
and the centralization of political power, Cleveland nevertheless
expanded the authority of the national government as he revised
federal land and Indian policies in the West and ordered the army
to Chicago during the 1894 Pullman strike. For all his fears of
constitutional innovation, he was neither a champion of big
business nor unaware of the problems posed by the post-Civil War
economic revolution. He signed the Interstate commerce Act, warned
against the growing power of industrial combination, advocated
voluntary federal arbitration of labor-management disputes, and
fought the monopolization of western lands by railroad an timber
corporations.
Welch places Cleveland's battles on behalf of tariff revision,
civil service reform, and the gold standard within the context of
the conundrum of a strong president who usually failed to gain the
cooperation of Congress or the Democratic party. Cleveland
reinvigorated the American presidency and reestablished an
equilibrium between the executive and legislative branches of the
federal government, but by his obdurate enmity to the silverites
and the "agrarian radicals," he helped assure the division and
defeat of his party in the election of 1896. Welch demonstrates
that Cleveland's achievements and failures as a political leader
were attributable to an authoritarian temperament that saw
compromise as surrender.
Two chapters of the book are devoted to Cleveland's diplomacy,
focusing especially on his response to Hawaiian and Cuban
revolutions and the boundary dispute between Venezuela and Great
Britain. Welch takes issue with the currently popular thesis that
U.S. diplomacy in the last decade of the nineteenth century
displayed a concerted governmental effort to solve domestic
economic problems by expanding foreign markets in East Asia and
Latin America.
In addition to providing insights into the character of one of
our more interesting presidents, this reassessment of Grover
Cleveland's historical legacy shows clearly that the Cleveland
years served as the essential preface to the development of a
modern presidency and to the identification for executive
power.
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