United States

The election was very close. On the evening of the voting it was apparent that the result depended upon the vote in New York state, but not until the end of the week was it certain that Cleveland had carried New York by the narrow margin of some 1,100 votes (out of more than one million) and been elected president.

Grover Cleveland’s first term

Cleveland was the first Democratic president since James Buchanan a quarter of a century earlier. More than two-thirds of the electoral votes he received came from Southern or border states, so that it appeared that his election marked the close of one epoch and the beginning of a new political era in which the South could again hope to have a major voice in the conduct of national affairs. Because of his brief career in politics, Cleveland had only a limited acquaintance with leaders of his own party. He accepted literally the constitutional principle of the separation of powers, and he opened his first annual message to Congress, in December 1885, with an affirmation of his devotion to “the partitions of power between our respective departments.” This appeared to be a disavowal of presidential leadership, but it quickly became apparent that Cleveland intended to defend vigorously the prerogatives that he believed belonged to the executive.

During his first term (1885–89) Cleveland was confronted with a divided Congress—a Republican Senate and a Democratic House. This added to the complexities of administration, especially in the matter of appointments. Cleveland was a firm believer in a civil service based on merit rather than on partisan considerations, but, as the first Democratic president in a quarter of a century, he was under great pressure to replace Republicans in appointive offices with Democrats. He followed a line of compromise. In his first two years he removed the incumbents from about two-thirds of the offices subject to his control, but he scrutinized the qualifications of Democrats recommended for appointment and in a number of instances refused to abide by the recommendations of his party leaders. He thus offended both the reformers, who wished no partisan removals, and his fellow Democrats, whose nominees he rejected. Although his handling of the patronage alienated some powerful Democrats, he scored a personal triumph when he persuaded Congress to repeal the obsolete Tenure of Office Act of 1867, which Republican senators had threatened to revive in order to embarrass him.

Cleveland was a conservative on all matters relating to money, and he was inflexibly opposed to wasteful expenditure of public funds. This caused him to investigate as many as possible of the hundreds of private bills passed by Congress to compensate private individuals, usually Federal veterans, for claims against the federal government. When, as was frequently the case, he judged these claims to be ill-founded, he vetoed the bill. He was the first president to use the veto power extensively to block the enactment of this type of private legislation.

The surplus and the tariff

The flurry of private pension bills had been stimulated, in part, by a growing surplus in the Treasury. In every year since the Civil War, there had been an excess of revenue over expenditures, a circumstance that encouraged suggestions for appropriations of public funds for a variety of purposes. The surplus also focused attention upon the tariff, the principal source of this excess revenue. In 1883 Congress had reviewed the tariff and made numerous changes in the rates, increasing the tariff on some items and reducing it on others, without materially decreasing the revenue received. Cleveland believed that the surplus presented a very real problem. It hoarded in the Treasury money that could have been in circulation, and it encouraged reckless spending by the government. Like many other Democrats, he disliked the high protective tariff. After waiting in vain for two years for Congress to meet this issue boldly, Cleveland adopted the extraordinary tactic of devoting his entire annual message in 1887 to a discussion of this question and to an appeal for a lowering of the tariff. The House then passed a bill generally conforming to Cleveland’s views on the tariff; but the Senate rejected it, and the tariff became a leading issue in the presidential campaign of 1888.

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