Winning a second term

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Cleveland spent the four years of the Harrison presidency in New York City, working for a prominent law firm. When the Republican-dominated Congress and the Harrison administration enacted the very high McKinley Tariff in 1890 and made the surplus in the treasury vanish in a massive spending spree, the path to a Democratic victory in 1892 seemed clear. Cleveland won his party’s nomination for the third consecutive time and then soundly defeated Harrison and Populist Party candidate James B. Weaver by 277 electoral votes to Harrison’s 145, making Cleveland the first president ever elected to discontinuous terms; in 2024 Donald Trump was also elected to a second nonconsecutive term.

Early in Cleveland’s second term the United States sank into the most severe economic depression the country had yet experienced. Cleveland believed that the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890—which required the secretary of the treasury to purchase 4.5 million ounces of silver each month—had eroded confidence in the stability of the currency and was thus at the root of the nation’s economic troubles. He called Congress into special session and, over considerable opposition from Southern and Western members of his own party, forced the repeal of the act. Yet the depression only worsened, and Cleveland’s negative view of government began to diminish his popularity. Apart from assuring a sound—i.e., gold-backed—currency, he insisted the government could do nothing to alleviate the suffering of the many thousands of people who had lost jobs, homes, and farms. His popularity sank even lower when—distraught over the diminishing quantity of gold in the treasury—he negotiated with a syndicate of bankers headed by John Pierpont Morgan to sell government bonds abroad for gold. The deal succeeded in replenishing the government’s gold supply, but the alliance between the president and one of the era’s leading “robber barons” intensified the feeling that Cleveland had lost touch with ordinary Americans.

That the president cared more about the interests of big business than those of ordinary Americans seemed manifest in Cleveland’s handling of the Pullman Strike in 1894. Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago to quell violence at George M. Pullman’s railroad car facility, despite the objections of Illinois Gov. John P. Altgeld. The strike was broken within a week, and the president received the plaudits of the business community. However, he had severed whatever support he still had in the ranks of labor.

In foreign policy, Cleveland displayed the same courageous righteousness that characterized much of his domestic policy. He withdrew from the Senate a treaty for the annexation of Hawaii when he learned how the Hawaiian leader, Queen Liliuokalani, had been overthrown in an American-led coup. He also refused to be swept along with popular sentiment for intervention on behalf of Cuban insurgents fighting for independence from Spain. Yet he was not totally immune to the new spirit of American assertiveness on the international stage. By invoking the Monroe Doctrine, for example, he forced Britain to accept arbitration of a boundary dispute between its colony of British Guiana (now Guyana) and neighboring Venezuela.

At the tumultuous Democratic convention in 1896, the party was divided between supporters of Cleveland and the gold standard and those who wanted a bimetallic standard of gold and silver designed to expand the nation’s money supply. When William Jennings Bryan delivered his impassioned Cross of Gold speech, the delegates not only nominated the little-known Bryan for president but also repudiated Cleveland—the first and only president ever to be so repudiated by his own party.

Cleveland retired to Princeton, New Jersey, where he became active in the affairs of Princeton University as a lecturer in public affairs and as a trustee (1901–08). As the rancor over the gold standard subsided with the return of prosperity, Cleveland regained much of the public admiration he had earlier enjoyed. Never again, however, would the Democratic Party adhere to the pro-business, limited-government views that so dominated his presidency, and Cleveland remains the most conservative Democrat to have occupied the White House since the Civil War.

Cabinet of Pres. Grover Cleveland

The table provides a list of cabinet members in the administration of Pres. Grover Cleveland.