Grover Cleveland
WHAT a comfort it is to find a statesman who did not succeed by his tongue! No doubt many statesmen have admirable qualities that go a little deeper; but there are so few for whom the tongue does not open the way that gives the other qualities a chance! It was not the tongue with Cleveland, at any rate. What was it? Some say, — or used to say,— largely a curious concatenation of favorable circumstances. But this explains nothing, and a careful study of his character and life will make it appear otherwise.
The astounding rapidity of Cleveland’s advance in the world does seem to favor the theory of accident. The son of a poor country minister in New York State, he had to make his way, and made it. He began to earn his living as a boy in a grocery store. Curiously enough, like his great rival, Blaine, he later held a position in a blind asylum. Afterwards, he found entrance into a lawyer’s office and by immense industry gradually established a solid practice. He was district attorney and sheriff of Erie County, but not exceptionally active or prominent in politics. Then, in 1881, at the age of forty-four, he became Mayor of Buffalo; in 1882, Governor of New York; in 1884, President of the United States; in 1892, President for a second term. Is it strange that during his first years in the White House he should have said, ‘Sometimes I wake at night and rub my eyes and wonder if it is not all a dream’?
How far was personal ambition a driving force in this extraordinary progress? If you will listen to Cleveland’s eulogists, you will think it was mainly absent. According to them, it would appear that great office called for such a man as he was, and he complied with the demand much against his good-nature. It needs but little knowledge of the human heart to find this view somewhat exaggerated. Men may distrust their own ability. They may weary of public cares and burdens. But few men have high dignity actually thrust upon them. I have no doubt that Cleveland liked to be Governor, liked to be President, especially relished all his life the grandeur of having filled those offices.
This does not mean that there was any untruth in his statement that ‘I never sought an office of any kind in my life.’ It does not mean that he would have sacrificed one grain of self-respect to win any office. As dignities came to him, he accepted and enjoyed the honor of them; but what they brought chiefly was duty. He set himself earnestly, strenuously, to fulfil that duty, and the task was so absorbing that he hardly perceived the necessary result of such fulfillment in another step outward and upward. When the presidential nomination came to him in 1884, he was occupied with his gubernatorial duties at Albany. Naturally he had divined what was coming, or others had obligingly divined it for him. But neither the nomination nor the campaign distracted him for a moment from his regular work. He stayed in his office and let others do the talking; or, if they talked too loudly around him, he went off for a day’s fishing and forgot them. The campaign was ugly, saturated with abuse and scandal. He paid no attention. Tell the truth, he said, and take the consequences. He appeared so little before the campaigning crowds that the sight of a great, surging, triumphant assembly was nearly too much for him. ‘In an almost broken voice he said: “I never before realized what was expressed in the phrase ‘a sea of faces’ — look at it; as beautiful and yet as terrible as the waves of the ocean.” ’
The honest earnestness of his attitude through it all shows in nothing better than in his way of receiving the news of his nomination. As he sat at his desk in his office, firing was heard outside. ‘They are firing a salute, Governor, over your nomination,’ said General Farnsworth. ‘That’s what it means,’ added Colonel Lamont. ‘Do you think so?’ said the Governor quietly. ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘anyhow, we’ll finish up this work.’ That was the man. Whatever happens, life or death, we’ll finish up this work.
II
With so much work and so little talk, it was natural that the country should not have known a great deal about the man it had elected president. It never did know him. It has only begun to know him since his death. Even to-day it is difficult to penetrate beneath the apparent stolidity, the calm, unshaken, impersonal reserve, to the warm human soul. And we have no such charming, indiscreet confidences as lurk and linger in the letters of Mrs. Blaine. But there was a human soul there, just the same.
There was intelligence, solid, substantial, reliable, if not broad. Early opportunities of education there had not been. The fierce necessities of bread and butter cut them off, and they were always deeply, perhaps excessively, regretted. There are some evidences of desultory reading: for instance, a rather surprising allusion to Sterne, and an out-ofthe-way quotation from Troilus and Cressida. But, in the main, large culture was not the foundation of Cleveland’s thought or life.
Nor was the lack of cultivation supplemented, as so often, by quickness or alertness of wit. Some men appear learned, and even are learned, by seizing the end of a thread here, another there, and patching all together into a respectable fabric of wide conversance. This process was foreign to Cleveland’s nature. He did not generalize, did not move readily and swiftly among abstract ideas, did not spring instantly to the far-reaching significance of the immediate. It is true, we have a most interesting saying of his: ‘ I cannot understand the meaning of any theory until I know how it happened.’ But this implied apparently rather the lawyer’s close and curious search for precedent than the scientist’s ample reach into the infinite relations of things.
On the other hand, if the intelligence was not swift or restless, it was vigorous, thorough, and exact. Once a problem was fairly stated, it had to be solved, and it had to be solved rightly. I cannot make this clearer than by quoting a most discerning account of Cleveland’s methods in conversation, which were evidently his methods in all intellectual activity. ‘At first there was a gradual approach to the question from one side, and then, perhaps after a little pause, unexpectedly from another. He was exploring, looking around, feeling his way, searching for the general dimensions. He literally “went around” the subject carefully and cautiously, and on all sides. And if some part necessary to its completeness was lacking, he made note of it, and took it into account all the way to the end of his discourse. When he had made his tour around the subject, as could be noted by a penetrating word here or a phrase of discovery there, his work was almost done, and with one step he went straight to the complex question. And then he was done and the talk was ended.’
A great deal has been said about Cleveland’s manner of writing. It is interesting to us because it is thoroughly significant of the man and of his intellectual quality. It is formal, elaborate, almost artificially literary, and people are surprised that a nature so simple, so elementary, in some respects so rudimentary, should adopt such conventional expression. They do not see that it is precisely because he was simple, reserved, an actor, not a talker, that his effort in words was labored and farfetched. Perfect simplicity and directness of form come naturally to those to whom words are an inborn gift. Those who deal by instinct with deeds, when they do talk, are apt to talk ponderously. Yet when Cleveland put the hammer of his character behind his words, they beat themselves into the memory of the nation; and few presidents have supplied history with more phrases that are remembered.
Cleveland’s general intellectual qualities are admirably illustrated in his spiritual and religious attitude. The metaphysics of religion had no attraction for him. He did not care to discuss speculative theology; and so-called higher criticism, with its fine-spun analyses and subtle interpretation of Scripture, was extremely distasteful to his practical bent. He had a certain fine, large, human tolerance, well illustrated in his excellent story of the old Baptist whom his Presbyterian friends tried to get into their church. ‘No; you folks are Presbyterians, and if I go over to your church I could n’t enjoy my mind.’ He liked to enjoy his own mind and to let others enjoy theirs. Nevertheless, his personal religion was essentially conservative. What his father had preached and his mother had practised was all he needed. ‘The Bible is good enough for me,’ he said: ‘just the old book under which I was brought up. I do not want notes, or criticisms, or explanations about authorship or origin, or even cross-references. I do not need or understand them, and they confuse me.’
It is true that, like other human beings, he did not always practise as he preached. There were irregularities in his earlier life which would have scandalized his mother. And his summer church attendance was not quite what his father would have approved. But if he did not always go to church, he rigidly respected the Sabbath. And he had all his life a fineness of conscience rather notable in a man of such wide experience of the world and so practical a temper. When he was offered a considerable sum for a magazine article, he refused to take so much because he had accepted less for a similar contribution. Again, he writes to a friend that he had declined an offer of a position, ‘to which was attached a very large salary, because I did not think I could do all the situation demanded and make the project a success.’ Still more striking is the account of his remorse over a possible misstatement in telling a fish-story. His hearer assured him that the statement must have been essentially correct and quieted him for the moment. But he returned to the matter several days afterward. Again he was reassured, and told that, with the circumstances as they were, his story must have been exact. ‘I hope so, I hope so,’ he assented doubtfully.
It is evident that the æsthetic element of religion would not have had much appeal for Cleveland. And in purely æsthetic matters he was even less responsive. Of the beauty of art he had little knowledge. To the beauty of nature he was more susceptible, and Professor West has admirably preserved for us the account of one experience which must have been representative of hundreds. ‘I can’t find a word for it,’ he said quietly, after a flood of sunshine had burst through a light April shower. ‘What makes it so beautiful? There is no word good enough. “Ravishing” comes nearest, I think. Where does it come from? Do you know what I mean? It is too good for us. Do you understand me? It is something we don’t deserve.’
The dumb but pervading sense of such natural beauty is bound up with what was always one of the greatest delights of Cleveland’s life — outdoor sport. He was an ardent fisherman and hunter. His little book of fishing sketches brings one right close to him, brings one right inside the garment of formal, conventional reserve more than anything else possibly could. You seem to be spending days of large, quiet pleasure with him, in the woods and on the water; to be hearing his quaint stories and shrewd comments, and entering into feelings which he never showed to congressmen or reporters. The very effort and obvious artifice of the expression reveal a simple nature doing its best to make refractory words convey what it seeks to utter and cannot. Under the calm, controlled surface you divine latent possibilities of excitement which could be aroused by keen sport as well as by human rivalry. There is temper there, there is depression there and discouragement, there is intense enthusiasm. There is the suggestion of imaginative range, also, though it is instantly checked and cooled by gentle irony: ‘The keen delights of imagination which should be the cheering concomitants of the most reputable grade of duck-hunting.’
It is characteristic of Cleveland’s conservative temper that his passion for sport was not modified into any of the later nineteenth-century equivalents. It was simply the hearty, out-ofdoors expression of full-blooded health and vigor. There is no sign of the slightest scientific curiosity connected with it. There is no pretentious humanitarianism. The object of hunting was killing; not wanton or wasteful, but plain killing, for the excitement to be extracted from it. Yet it must not be for a moment supposed that he was a hard or cruel man. He was much the contrary. Lowell’s keen vision detected this on slight contact. ‘With all his firmness, he has a very tender and sympathetic nature, or I am much mistaken.’ The tenderness showed in many ways. Even as to animals there was an almost exaggerated sympathy, when they were not objects of sport. He once worried for days because he had not interfered to protect a cat which some boys were chasing. He had all the horror of death that is natural to persons of energetic vitality. He had the deepest pity for suffering, and the pity tended quickly to take active forms of relief.
He had especially one of the surest signs of sensibility and tenderness, a constant love and appreciation of children. He felt their sorrows. ‘ The cry of a child always distressed him. It made him quite miserable sometimes when he was walking through the village. He always wanted to stop and find out what was the matter.’ Their sports and spirits amused him and he entered into them quietly but keenly, as if he were a child himself. Children perceived this, as they always do. General Wood, who knew Cleveland well, says, ‘He was as fond of children as was Lincoln. He understood them, and they instinctively knew it and felt it, and they came to him as a friend.’
It is notable that this intimacy with children often goes with a rather reserved and generally unsocial temperament. This is strikingly true of General Lee, as of Cleveland. The explanation is simple. Children ask sympathy and attention. They never ask you to give yourself. To Cleveland, as to Lee, the conventional restraints of formal society were irksome. Cleveland could indeed supply charming platitudes on social duty, as in the Fishing Sketches: ‘Every individual, as a unit in the scheme of civilized social life, owes to every man, woman and child within such relationship an uninterrupted contribution to the fund of enlivening and pleasant social intercourse.’ This recalls the pretty saying of the old dramatist: ‘We were all born, my lord, in our degrees to make one another merry.’ But Cleveland avoided the obligation when he could, hated long dinners and pompous ceremonies, and on such occasions would often sit perfectly silent and not manifest an overpowering interest in the talkativeness of others.
He hated the display and luxury and extravagance of society, also. He believed that a community showed its sanity in its simplicity, and the attacks in his writings on the money craze of his contemporaries and their mad rush for wealth are so frequent as almost to suggest a hobby. He practised frugality as well as preached it, cared nothing for costly clothes or fare or ornament. One day, during his second term as president, a train stopped at the Gray Gables station. ‘Look,’ called the conductor to the passengers, impersonally, ‘there’s Mrs. Cleveland and Grover on the platform.’ The passengers looked. ‘Well,’ said one woman, ‘if I had fifty thousand dollars a year, I would n’t dress like that.’
It must not be for a moment supposed, however, that Cleveland’s economy arose from any taint of meanness. He was as indifferent to the accumulation of money as to the spending of it. He tells us so himself, speaking of the sacrifice of several thousand dollars for an unnecessary scruple. ‘But I don’t deserve any credit for that, because money has never been a temptation to me.’ And others, many others, bear him out. Even in his early law practice ‘he was indifferent and careless as to his fees. His clients had to offer him money.’ And the failure to accumulate arose not only from indifference, but from wide generosity. Without the least ostentation, he helped many a poor and struggling applicant — and non-applicant — over difficulties and tight places. When he left the law, his partner wrote: ‘I am now closing up a case of Cleveland’s which has been running on for years, during all which time he has paid all disbursements . . . because the man was too poor to meet these necessary expenses. And this is only one case out of many that are here on our books.’
The assertion that Cleveland avoided general society does not mean that he did not appreciate human fellowship. To be sure, he found politics rather detrimental to friendship. Where there is so much to give, casual affection is apt to look for what may be got and to wither when disappointed. Also, such firm and self-centred natures are less disposed to form human ties than those which naturally turn to others for advice and comfort and support. But for that very reason the friendships formed are founded on a deeper comprehension and sympathy and are usually loyal and permanent. In the very last years of his life Cleveland wrote some touching words about his own — perhaps imagined — deficiencies in the matter of human association, and about his love and longing for it. ‘I have left many things undone that I ought to have done in the realm of friendship . . . and still it is in human nature for one to hug the praise of his fellows and the affection of friends to his bosom as his earned possession.’ Certainly no one can read Gilder’s charming Record of Friendship without finding in it all the evidence of deep and genuine feeling. And the close association of Cleveland and Joseph Jefferson, so different in character and in their life-interests, yet each so finely tempered in his own way, is one of the pleasant traditions of American biography.
Cleveland’s personal affection went even deeper in his domestic relations than with his friends. His mother’s memory and the reflection of her tenderness were treasured all his life. When he was elected Governor of New York, he wrote to his brother, ‘Do you know that, if mother were alive, I should feel so much safer.’ After McKinley’s term had begun, he said, ‘I envy him to-day only one thing and that was the presence of his own mother at his inauguration. I would have given anything in the world if my mother could have been at my inauguration.’ All the glimpses that we get of his own home life, with wife and children, are charming, and show it as simple, devoted, sympathetic, undemonstrative, but participant of joy and grief alike.
And in these intimate relations with those who knew him best the quiet, shy, reserved Cleveland of general society melted and mellowed into the best of company and the most responsive of listeners and talkers. ‘He had a real “gift” of silenced says one of his biographers; that is, he could be silent in a way to chill impertinence and curiosity and again, in a very different fashion, to inspire enthusiasm and tempt confidence. And then, with the right company, he would talk himself, would drop reserve and restraint and give out his hope and heart with singular and engaging frankness, and so simply that you almost saw the life right through the severing veil of speech.
The picture of Cleveland in these elementary social connections would be quite incomplete without recognition of his very attractive and winning humor. People who know him only as the heavy and somewhat solemn official do not appreciate this. Yet even in public addresses he could indulge in a vein of pleasantry. And all the testimony goes to show that in conversation Cleveland could relish a joke and make one, less often perhaps with pointed wit than with those shrewd, quiet, turns of ironic humor peculiarly American. The Fishing Sketches are permeated through and through with simple fun of just this sort, which at its best sometimes recalls the frolic fancy of Lamb, although it is a Lamb with the slightly cumbrous gambol of an elephant. The ways of fishermen are inexplicable, says the ex-President: ‘The best fishermen do not attempt it; they move and strive in the atmosphere of mystery and uncertainty, constantly aiming to reach results without a clue, and through the cultivation of faculties non-existent or inoperative in the common mind.’ And again, fishermen, ‘to their enjoyment and edification, are permitted by a properly adjusted mental equipment to believe what they hear.’
III
From the preceding analysis of Cleveland’s personal qualities, it will be evident that in some respects he was not adapted to political success. Few great statesmen have made themselves by their own definite action in behalf of right more deliberately unpopular. Cleveland himself was perfectly aware of this, and could even state it with a certain grim enjoyment. In speaking of one of his vetoes as governor, he said, ‘Before I married, I sometimes used to talk to myself when I was alone; and after the veto, that night, when I was throwing off my clothes, I said aloud: “By to-morrow at this time I shall be the most unpopular man in the State of New York.” ’ He had little or none of that tact which enables some men to ingratiate themselves more in refusing than others when they grant. Shyness, reserve, obstinate determination to do right, regardless of anybody’s feelings, are all far from being passports to triumph in American politics.
Moreover, Cleveland hated publicity and was always suspicious and distrustful of newspapers and representatives of the press. He had no tincture of the useful art of appearing to tell them everything and telling them nothing. He had an excellent memory, and a paper which had once criticized him unjustly, or, even worse, ridiculed him, was disliked and avoided. Though selfcontrolled and self-contained in all his passions, journalistic indiscretion was more apt than anything else to arouse him to a burst of temper. Of his many snubs to reporters perhaps none was neater than the remark to a young fellow who was trying to elicit comment on some question of foreign policy: ‘That, sir, is a matter of too great importance to discuss in a five-minute interview, now rapidly drawing to its close.’ The retort was shrewd, but not calculated to promote affection.
On the other hand, even politicians and journalists could not fail to appreciate Cleveland’s great public merits. There is his honesty, his infinite candor. Said one journalist, after an attempt to get something, ‘He is the greatest man I ever met — and he would n’t promise to do a thing I wanted.’ Nothing touches the American people like straightforward truth-telling. When Cleveland’s youthful morals were impeached and he said at once, ‘Tell the facts,’ he won more votes than any possible subterfuge could have gained for him. Honesty was a habit with him; it was constitutional. It was so ingrained that, as a fisherman, he could even afford to make a jest of it and give as the principle of that fraternity, ‘In essentials — truthfulness; in non-essentials — reciprocal latitude.’ When it was a matter of life, not fishing, there was no question of jest. His son once brought out the truth under great temptation to the contrary, and Cleveland remarked to an intimate friend that the boy ‘evidently was going to be like him; because untruthfulness seemed to be no temptation to either of them.’
And as his candor appealed to the American nation, so did his democratic way of living and thinking. He knew the common people, he had passed all his early life in intimate contact with them, and watched them and studied them with insight and sympathy, saying little but seeing much. Lowell, with his quick discernment, said of him, ‘He is a truly American type of the best kind — a type very dear to me, I confess.’ He grasped the large daily facts of human nature, because his own temperament was peculiarly and singly based on them. He needed no effort to enter into common lives, because his own life was common, in the best sense. He would fish all day with an old farmer and swap long stories with him, and then incidentally get and give homely views about the political questions of the hour. When, as governor, he was walking down to the State House at Albany, if he came up with the blind crier of the courts, he would take his arm and help him along over the crossings, and let the business of his great office wait.
He cannot be said to have won votes by pure oratory. He was not a natural speaker, had not a trace of the magnetism that carries vast multitudes away in a storm of excitement. At the same time, especially in later life, his speeches told. He prepared them with the utmost care and delivered them with dignity and measured ease, and every hearer felt that they had character and purpose behind them. Even his appearance, while never splendid or imposing, carried the stamp of the square, determined energy which conquers the world.
These things touched the general public. But how was it with the politiical managers? Cleveland is generally supposed to have been weak here. His admirers often urge that all his success was gained, not through the politicians, but in spite of them, and that he did not stoop to or understand the ordinary methods by which the political game is played. Their arguments are to a certain extent borne out by his own remark, ‘This talk about the importance of “playing politics” — look at the men who have played it. Have they got as far, after all, as I have?’ On the other hand, he was not so wholly ignorant as some supposed. He knew men thoroughly, and such knowledge is the first requisite of political success. Moreover, even character will not make a man Governor of New York without some acquaintance with political machinery. And against the above comment of Cleveland we can set another, which may not contradict but certainly amplifies it: ‘Somehow there seems to have been an impression that I was dealing with something I did not understand; but these men little knew how thoroughly I had been trained, and how I often laughed in my sleeve at their antics.’
Another thing: in political management, as in everything else, labor counts. Cleveland’s superb physical strength and tireless industry enabled him to attend to details which others are forced to neglect. He always knew what was going on, and this is the first step to controlling it. He believed in doing one’s own work, doing it carefully and systematically, and leaving nothing to chance. There is an immense secret of achievement in the apparently twoedged compliment of Tilden to his distinguished follower: ‘He is the kind of man who would rather do something badly for himself than have somebody else do it well.’
And Cleveland had another element of political success. He was an intense party man. We have seen the pleasant humor which played over the surface of his temperament. But it did not enter into his politics. Life was not a game to him, as it was to Seward, or a dainty work of art. He took the Democratic Party with an almost appalling seriousness. Over and over he reiterates that the salvation of the country, if not the salvation of the world, must be accomplished by the Democrats. His elaborate statement of the Democratic creed in 1891 is, to be sure, fairly general; but its possibility of fulfilment was, for him, completely bound up with Democratic organization. ‘Of all the wonders that I have seen during my life,’ said he, ‘none has quite so impressed me as the reserve power of the Democratic Party, which seems to have the elements of earthly immortality.’ And within a few months of his death he gave cordial assent to the most sweeping possible declaration of party loyalty: ‘Whatever your own party may do, it is always a mistake to vote for a Republican.’
Yet, from what we have already seen of the man, it is hardly necessary to say that he never sacrificed and never would have sacrificed duty, as he saw it, to any party consideration. At an early stage in his career he wrote officially: ‘I believe in an open and sturdy partisanship, which secures the legitimate advantages of party supremacy; but parties were made for the people, and I am unwilling, knowingly, to give my assent to measures purely partisan, which will sacrifice or endanger their interests.’ He never did give his assent to such. When he was being considered as a candidate for a third nomination, he declared, ‘If I am ever President of this country again, I shall be President of the whole country, and not of any set of men or class in it.’
And, however he may have disapproved of Republican principles, he was always fair and even friendly toward Republican individuals. His repeated judgments of McKinley and of McKinley’s administration showed the broadest allowance for practical difficulties and the keenest sympathy with honest effort.
Further, he did not hesitate to fight the objectionable elements in his own party, wherever he found them. ‘We love him for the enemies he has made,’ said General Bragg, at the time of Cleveland’s first nomination. The American people loved him for those enemies and do still. But the wire-pulling and ring-running politicians in the Democratic party did not love him, and at times he seemed more severed from them than from even the Republicans. Colonel Watterson declares that ‘He split his party wide open. The ostensible cause was the money issue. But underlying this there was a deal of personal embitterment. . . . Through Mr. Cleveland, the party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Tilden was converted from a Democratic into a Populist.’ This is an exaggerated view. Yet it is certain that lack of political tact, and perhaps a slightly increasing fixity in his own opinions, brought Cleveland into a vast deal of friction. Speaking of him and Harrison, Henry Adams says, in his epigrammatic way, ‘Whatever harm they might do their enemies was as nothing when compared with the mortality they inflicted on their friends.’ There was too frequent trouble with friends and enemies both. Cleveland’s difficulties with the Senate are matter of history; and although he may have had the final wisdom on his side, the results for his administrative usefulness could not but be harmful.
Also, all these public conflicts were isolating, produced a feeling of helplessness and depression, even in a temperament so calm and solid as his. In 1894 he wrote: ‘There never was a man in this high office so surrounded with difficulties and so perplexed and so treacherously treated and so abandoned by those whose aid he deserves, as the present incumbent. But there is a God, and the patriotism of the American people is not dead; nor is all truth and virtue and sincerity gone out of the Democratic Party.’ The patriotism of the American people is not dead yet, and the very isolation which at the time seemed to prove the President unpractical and impracticable, serves to-day to increase his dignity and to place him secure above all parties as a great American.
IV
But let us elucidate a little more definitely what Cleveland actually stands for in American history, since it must be supposed that the man who suggested the phrase, ‘Public office is a public trust,’ and who gave his life to working from that text, must have left some memorial of permanent significance.
It may be said at once that this memorial is not to be sought mainly in positive, progressive administrative achievement. Cleveland would not indeed have denied the possibility or desirability of progress. Some of his utterances, especially as to wealth and capital, have a radical tone which sounds like the advanced twentieth century. Still, it cannot be said that he initiated great movements or changes of any kind. Even his most positive efforts, as with the tariff and civil-service reform, like his splendid private usefulness in the insurance world, were rather in the nature of a return to purer and saner ideals, an endeavor to put public business on the basis of thrift and common sense that is absolutely necessary to success in the conduct of private affairs.
For the man was essentially, by habit and temperament, a thorough conservative. It may seem a little surprising to find such a type in the Democratic Party, at least in the North. To understand this, we must appreciate the wholesome, admirable truth that in our American system each of the two major parties is capable of being either conservative or radical. We usually think of the Republicans as conservative, entrenched in tradition and custom. Yet the cardinal principle of Republicanism is the strength and vitality of the Federal government, and, as substantially all progress and radical change must come through that government, it is natural that radical and progressive elements should be constantly found in Republican alliance. On the other hand, while the Democrats suggest radicalism, their two fundamental tenets have always been the reduction of all government interference to the lowest terms, and in especial a jealous assertion of the state governments against the Federal. Under the American Constitution these two principles mean instinctive, persistent conservatism.
It is thus that we find Cleveland, in the midst of so many radical, disturbing factors, the incarnation of conservatism, of a firm, insistent, reiterated negative. The value of such a negative force in any popular government may be measured by the difficulty of maintaining it. To say no is the ordinary politician’s stumbling-block. Even when he is forced to say it, he mouths it with qualifying adjectives and explanations, seeking in vain to mix the opposing bitter with the seducing sweet.
This was never the trouble with Cleveland. A good, round, sonorous ‘No’ came from him without the slightest difficulty and there was no disputing and no revoking it. From this point of view even his limitations were a help to him. He was not a broad, speculative political thinker, did not suffer from the doubts and qualifications that always accompany such thought. His most abstract writing, Presidential Problems, is perfectly concrete, though the questions treated in it would have been tempting to a discursive, imaginative philosopher. ‘It is a condition which confronts us — not a theory,’ is perhaps Cleveland’s best-known saying. He was always dealing with conditions, dealing with them fairly, honestly, but practically, and leaving theories on one side. The strong features of his character were all such as to give the conservative, negative element full force and vigor. He was simple and direct, and that helps. He was immensely silent, and that helps. He had illimitable patience, and patience is as indispensable in conservatism as in other things. As he himself said, ‘ Certainly the potency of patience as a factor in all worldly achievement and progress cannot be overestimated.’ Finally, he had determination pushed to a degree which he himself was perfectly ready to call obstinacy, ‘his native obstinacy, which he always insisted was his principal virtue.’ He said on one occasion, ‘I want to tell you now that if every other man in the country abandons this issue, I shall stick to it.’ He said it and he meant it.
We have only to consider the chief historical events associated with Cleveland’s name to see how marked in all is this negative side. I have already said that it was largely characteristic of his tariff activity. Negative, his effort to check the free coinage of silver. Negative, his superb action in the great railroad strike. Negative, essentially, the most criticized of all his performances, the Venezuela message to Congress. As we look through his writings and those of his biographers, the thing that impresses us most overwhelmingly is veto, veto, veto. No doubt this is the chief function that all American constitutions leave to the Executive. But in Cleveland’s case it seems to have been exercised with temperamental readiness. Take his mayoralty, take his governorship, take his presidency: always the veto. His presidential vetos in four years amounted to more than twice the number in the aggregate of all his predecessors, says Richardson. And, of course, in no case was the motive mere opposition or petulance, or personal grudge. Every veto was thought out with the most scrupulous care and motived with the most patient reasoning. The first functionary in the country sat up night after night till the small hours, studying why he should say no to the petty and insignificant petition of some fraudulent pensioner.
From one point of view there is infinite pathos in seeing a great statesman spend his soul on such minute detail of negation, instead of on the great problems of the world. The ultimate value and fruitfulness of this negative attitude appears only when we consider that it was based upon the deepest, strongest, fundamental belief in the people and in popular government. For all his conservatism, Cleveland was no reactionary, no aristocrat, no advocate of ruling the masses by the assumed superior wisdom of a chosen few. He held that the people should rule themselves, that they could, and that they would, if a free chance was given them. He believed in American ideals, American traditions. He speaks of his ‘passionate Americanism,’ and the phrase, coming from one who knew and swayed his passions, is immensely significant. And he believed in popular government because he put behind it the whole mass and solidity of his belief in God. God had ordained the framing of the American Republic. God sustained it. ‘A free people,’ he said, ‘without standards of right beyond what they saw or did, without allegiance to something unseen above them all, would soon sink below their own level.’
It was just because he believed heartily and wholly in American popular government that he wished to guard it as it was. Let those who believed in neither God nor man keep restlessly trying experiments, overturning the old without any assurance of the new. He had studied the Constitution as the Fathers had left it. He had seen it working and believed it would work still. It might be imperfect, like other human things. Would the new devices be less so? The thing was, to take the old and treat it honestly, industriously, faithfully. So treated, it would justify itself in the future as it had done in the past.
Thus it was that, as a superb negative force acting for a great positive purpose, Grover Cleveland did his work in the world. A few grand phrases of his own show how he did it better than any description I can furnish. Speaking of Lincoln and his many military pardons, he said: ‘Notwithstanding all that might be objectionable in these, what was he doing? He was fortifying his own heart? And that was his strength, his own heart; that is a man’s strength.’ Fortifying his own heart! Again, there is the splendid sentence about Secretary Carlisle: ‘We are just right for each other; he knows all I ought to know, and I can bear all we have to bear.’ Could a man say it more simply and humbly? ‘I can bear all I have to bear.’ Finally, there are almost the last words he ever spoke, and what finer last words could any human being speak? ‘I have tried so hard to do right.’
A four-square, firm, solid, magnificent Titan, who could speak the everlasting no, so rare and so essential in democracy. We still await the genius, even greater than he, who can speak the everlasting yes.