History Healthy and Unhealthy

Trump and his Fin-de-Siecle Antecedents

There is an unhealthy line of historical inquiry afoot, questioning whether Grover Cleveland is the model for one Donald J. Trump. Cleveland, a Democrat, was elected President in 1884 and unseated by the Republican Benjamin Harrison four years later. When Grover and his young bride, Frances, packed their bags, Frances told the White House staff they would return.

“When is that?” a servant inquired.

Said Frances: “We are coming back just four years from today.”

And so it was. Cleveland defeated Harrison in 1892, the only vanquished President to turn the tables on his usurper. His victory was somewhat pyrrhic. Cleveland’s return was marred by the Depression of 1893 (the worst the country had suffered to date), and it endured for substantially his entire second term. Careful what you wish for.

But to our point, will Trump — last seen in Mar-a-Lago prowling among hollowed file cabinets emptied of classified materials — play Cleveland to Joe Biden’s Harrison?

The comparison could not be more misplaced. The portly Cleveland was quite possibly the most honest President since Washington and Lincoln. He refused to indulge in personal smears — even to defend himself against unfair charges.

His integrity was fastened to the mast of principle. He championed tight budgets and fought against the spoils system that had corrupted Gilded Age politics. Again and again he took unpopular positions because, well, he believed in them. When he was running for reelection in 1888, advisers warned him not to push for tariff cuts (a bedrock Cleveland goal, and a controversial one). Cleveland ignored them. “What is the use of being elected or reelected,” he said, “unless you stand for something?” As Woodrow Wilson was to say, Cleveland governed with complete disregard for political calculation. 

The onetime Buffalo mayor loathed the populists of his day for, as he saw it, throwing red meat to the crowd. He loathed especially the great crowd-pleasing populist of his era, William Jennings Bryan. It was Bryan, at age 36, who dethroned Cleveland as spiritual head of the Democratic Party. At the end of Cleveland’s second term, with the country mired in a second wave of depression, the Democrats nominated the boy wonder silver advocate and renounced the Cleveland agenda, in particular his signature, and deflationary, monetary policy, the gold standard.

Bryan campaigned on an innate faith in the rightness of his views, and an intuitive feeling for the masses. His campaign was essentially backward looking, appealing to a rural America as it had existed, mythically, before the post-Civil War industrialization. Although he lost in three presidential runs, his base remained steadfast. Such was his influence that in 1912, when he chose not to run and the Democratic Convention was deadlocked, it was Bryan who tipped the convention to Woodrow Wilson, who was nominated on the 46th ballot.

Bryan was a teetotaling Nebraska fundamentalist, oriented to the country’s godly interior. He loathed the cosmopolitan coast, and they loathed him right back. He served as Wilson’s Secretary of State (thus did Wilson repay the debt) but resigned in protest when Wilson edged toward war with Germany. Defeating the Kaiser was not his war. Defeating evolutionary science was. In 1925, he joined the team prosecuting John T. Scopes for allegedly teaching that man had descended from monkeys.

If there is an historical model for Trump, it is surely not Cleveland; Bryan is a much better fit. Even that comparison is unfair (to Bryan). The Great Commoner left a mixed legacy. He was early to various worthy causes including popular election of senators (in his day chosen by state legislatures) and women’s suffrage. The money we use today, fiat money, is closer to Bryan’s bimetallism than Cleveland’s gold. Cleveland saw inflation as the true godlessness; Bryan, his gaze fixed on impoverished wheat farmers, was inflation’s unashamed champion.

As an antidote to Trump, we’ll pass the baton back to Cleveland. When he lost to Harrison in 1888, rumors of election fraud were rife. Cleveland was above such talk. Asked about his loss, he said, “It was mainly because the other party had the most votes.” There was more decency in that one line than in all the ravings from #45.

Troy Senik has written a new biography of Cleveland, A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland. You can read my review of A Man of Iron, published last week in the Wall Street Journal, here.