Episode 7: Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison

A full transcript of this episode can be found here.

Show Notes

Overview:

Today’s episode is all about Presidents Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th presidents of the United States—one of the most unusual transitions in US history. Cleveland served one term from 1885 to 1889, lost the election to Benjamin Harrison, who was in turn replaced by Cleveland in 1892. Whew. And you thought our times were complicated!

Here’s a quick refresher on Presidents Cleveland and Harrison. Cleveland was born in 1837 and grew up in upstate New York. Like many of the previous presidents we discussed, he taught school while reading law and was admitted to the New York Bar in 1859. Unlike our previous presidents, he didn’t fight in the Civil War, however.

Cleveland chose instead to hire a substitute—a Polish immigrant—for $150 to serve in his place. In case you were wondering, that was perfectly legal at the time. Cleveland climbed the political ranks instead, serving as his community’s local sheriff, as Mayor of Buffalo, and then governor of New York, before he was selected as the 1884 Democratic nominee for president. He campaigned on a promise to clean up politics and his strong anti-corruption helped secure his victory, despite widespread accusations of sexual assault and that he had fathered a child out of wedlock.

Cleveland won the presidency despite these well-founded scandalous charges, the first Democrat to win the office since the Civil War. Known as a political reformer and fiscal conservative, he refused to play by the standard rules of the corrupt political machines that dominated late 19th century politics, refusing even to fire any Republican working for the government so long as they continued to do their job well. On foreign policy, he was a committed opponent of territorial expansion, especially beyond the country’s continental borders.

His record on race was less commendable. Like many Democrats, Cleveland considered Reconstruction a failure in the South, and made no effort to defend black civil rights or appoint African-Americans to civil service jobs. Out West, he tried to restrict the flow of Chinese immigrants, who despite their invaluable work building the transcontinental railroad, Cleveland considered impossible to properly assimilate into American life. He also pushed for the passage of the Dawes Act, which distributed native-American lands to white settlers and help the federal government erode tribal sovereignty.

His first term ended in defeat, as Benjamin Harrison won the 1888 election, becoming the first and only presidential grandson in American history, which is why there are two Presidents Harrison to commit to memory. This Harrison ran a compelling campaign in 1888, promising a heavy tariff that appealed in particular to protectionist voters in the industrial north. A quick look at the electoral college map from this period shows that what we’d come to call the rustbelt of America would soon, and for decades to come, hold the key to the White House…as is in some sense still true today.

Harrison was born in Ohio in 1833 and enjoyed a relatively idyllic childhood. He graduated from Miami University in 1852, studied law, and in joined the Union Army as an officer once the Civil War broke out. Serving admirably, he rose in the ranks, winning a general’s star.

He rose in the ranks of the Republican Party after the war as well. Returning to his law practice, he supported James Garfield’s presidential bid, and represented Indiana in the United States Senate. Unlike Cleveland, Harrison promoted African-American education in the South and opposed restrictions on Chinese immigration while pushing for the creation of new states out west.

The election of 1888, however, wasn’t easy. Indeed it was one of only five elections in American history in which the winner of the electoral college vote failed to win the popular vote. Such elections seem to come in spurts, with two in the last decades of the 19th century, and of course two more in the first two decades of our 21st.

But when it comes to president, only electoral votes matter in the end, and once in office, Harrison reaffirmed the Monroe Doctrine as the centerpiece of American foreign policy, supported political reform based on merit, rather than on spoils, and advocated for pensions for disabled veterans from the Civil War. Harrison also approved the new Sherman Antitrust Act, which gave the government authority to limit trusts and monopolies, though he didn’t use this new presidential authority. That key moment in presidential history would have to wait until the 20th century, but don’t worry, we’ll get there in a few weeks.

President Harrison also urged Congress to pass legislation defending suffrage and civil rights for African Americans. The Senate refused, however, leaving Harrison to continue to speak out on behalf of black Americans. He had less sympathy for native Americans, overseeing suppression of the Wounded Knee uprising in South Dakota, and forcing mass native removal and assimilation.

After a subdued campaign, Cleveland won a decisive victory in their 1892 rematch and returned to the White House. His second term was marred by the panic of 1893 and the resulting severe economic depression. He also campaigned against the Lodge Bill, which strengthened voting rights protections, and worked anew to repeal federal protections over the electoral process, producing more extreme Jim Crow restrictions.

Our two experts today will fill in the details of their stories, and how their politics continue to inform our current moment. Together our guests highlighted two key stories from this period:

First, the ongoing battle, and ultimately the ongoing erosion, of African-American civil rights in the South now a full generation after the Civil War’s end
And second, immigration’s increasingly key role in the fight over who could, in fact, be a citizen, or if you will, a real American.

Guest 1: Dr. Greg Downs

greg downs.png — Professor Downs studies the political and cultural history of the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Particularly, he investigates the transformative impact of the Civil War, the end of slavery, and the role of **military force** in establishing new meanings of freedom. He is the author of two books on Reconstruction and Mapping Occupation, an interactive digital history of the U.S. Army’s occupation of the South (www.mappingoccupation.org). He is also a co-editor of a scholarly volume on the post-Civil War world.

As a public historian, Downs co-wrote the National Park Service’s Theme Study on Reconstruction and helped edit the Park Service’s handbook on Reconstruction. His efforts have been highlighted in ***The Atlantic*** and the ***New York Times***.

Downs is increasingly interested in the relationship between the U.S. Civil War and concurrent crises in Central America and Spain. His article, "The Mexicanization of American Politics: The United States' Transnational Path from Civil War to Stabilization" appeared in the American Historical Review in 2012. In 2016 Downs delivered the Brose Lectures at Penn State University's Richards Civil War Era Center on the U.S. Civil War as part of an international revolutionary wave that ran from Spain and Cuba in the 1850s through the U.S. and Mexico in the late 1850s-1860s and back to Spain and Cuba in the late 1860s/1870s. He is currently revising those lectures into a book to be published in UNC Press' Brose Lecture Series.

In 2018, he was elected to the Society of American Historians and given UC Davis' Distinguished Scholarly Public Service Award.

Publications:

The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic (University of North Carolina Press, 2019)

After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Harvard University Press, 2015)