Grover Cleveland

C

Marriage

In early June 1886, the 49-year-old president married Frances Folsom, daughter of a former law partner. Cleveland was the first president to be married in the White House. The couple had three daughters and two sons.

D

Major Legislation

During his first term, Cleveland supported two major pieces of legislation. One was the Dawes Act of 1887, also called the Allotment Act. This act attempted to change the Native Americans’ communal way of living and replace it with a sense of individualism by distributing tribal lands to individual Native Americans. The act failed to achieve its goal. Instead, much of the land fell into the hands of whites, further impoverishing a decreasing Native American population (see Native Americans of North America).

The second major bill was the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, which said that charges on railroads must be “reasonable and just.” This law established the principle of federal regulation of the economy. It created the Interstate Commerce Commission but did not give it sufficient powers to regulate railroads effectively.

Cleveland also wanted to reduce the huge surplus then in the U.S. Treasury. He felt that the soundest way to do this was to lower the tariff, a tax on imports. Industries in Northern urban areas and banking interests tended to favor such tariffs because they helped domestic businesses by increasing the cost of imported goods; agricultural areas in the West and the South tended to oppose them because they made it harder for people to buy cheap foreign goods such as clothing. Cleveland presented his position on the tariff in a message to Congress late in 1887, but Congress did not act, and the tariff question became a major issue in the election of 1888.

---

---

E

Election of 1888

In 1888 the Democratic Party split over the tariff issue and over Cleveland’s generally conservative position. However, Cleveland was renominated by the Democrats. His Republican opponent was Benjamin Harrison of Indiana. The Republican platform favored more high tariffs. Cleveland received only 168 electoral votes to Harrison’s 233. Nevertheless, the defeated president received about 100,000 more popular votes than did Harrison.

F

Election of 1892

When Cleveland left public office in 1889, he returned to New York City and resumed his law practice. Three years later, the Democrats again turned to him as their party’s greatest vote-getter. At their national convention Cleveland was nominated on the first ballot.

In his third presidential campaign, Cleveland stood his ground against western Democrats who demanded free coinage of silver. The unrestricted, or free, coinage of silver would have increased the amount of money available, causing the value of the dollar to decline. Farmers in the South and the West supported free silver because they relied heavily on credit and would have been able to repay their loans much more easily. Western mining companies also favored free silver because it increased the market for their silver. Banks would have received money that was worth less than the money they had loaned; financial interests therefore opposed free silver. Because Cleveland refused to advance the free silver cause, many southern and western Democrats called Cleveland a “bloated Wall Street puppet.”

The Republicans in their campaign defended their high-tariff policy against repeated and strong Democratic criticism, but that was not enough. Despite the arguments within his own party, Cleveland decisively defeated President Harrison, 277 electoral votes to 145.

V

Second Term as President

Cleveland took the presidential oath on March 4, 1893. Once more the job-seekers proved nearly unendurable. The president complained that the period set apart for receiving Congressmen had been “almost entirely spent in listening to applications for office.”

A

Domestic Affairs

	More from Encarta
	•  7 tips for funding an online degree •  How to succeed in the fashion industry without being a top designer •  Presidential Myths Quiz •  Coffee break: Recharge your brain