The Real Grover Cleveland—Two Clevelands Before and After Marriage—A
Correspondence and a Break of Personal Relations
I
There were, as I have said, two Grover Clevelands—before and after
marriage—and, it might be added, between his defeat in 1888 and his
election in 1892. He was so sure of his election in 1888 that he could
not be induced to see the danger of the situation in his own State of
New York, where David Bennett Hill, who had succeeded him in the
governorship, was a candidate for reelection, and whom he personally
detested, had become the ruling party force. He lost the State, and
with it the election, while Hill won, and thereby arose an ugly faction
fight.
I did not believe as the quadrennial period approached in 1892 that Mr.
Cleveland could be elected. I still think he owed his election, and
Harrison his defeat, to the Homestead riots of the midsummer, which
transferred the labor vote bodily from the Republicans to the
Democrats. Mainly on account of this belief I opposed his nomination
that year.
In the Kentucky State Convention I made my opposition resonant, if not
effective. “I understand,” I said in an address to the assembled
delegates, “that you are all for Grover Cleveland?”
There came an affirmative roar.
“Well,” I continued, “I am not, and if you send me to the National
Convention I will not vote for his nomination, if his be the only name
presented, because I firmly believe that his nomination will mean the
marching through a slaughter-house to an open grave, and I refuse to be
party to such a folly.”
The answer of the convention was my appointment by acclamation, but it
was many a day before I heard the last of my unlucky figure of speech.
Notwithstanding this splendid indorsement, I went to the National
Convention feeling very like the traditional “poor boy at a frolic.”
All seemed to me lost save honor and conviction. I had become the
embodiment of my own epigram, “a tariff for revenue only.” Mr.
Cleveland, in the beginning very much taken by it, had grown first
lukewarm and then frightened. His “Free Trade” message of 1887 had been
regarded by the party as an answering voice. But I knew better.
In the national platform, over the protest of Whitney, his organizer,
and Vilas, his spokesman, I had forced him to stand on that gospel. He
flew into a rage and threatened to modify, if not to repudiate, the
plank in his letter of acceptance. We were still on friendly terms and,
upon reaching home, I wrote him the following letter. It reads like
ancient history, but, as the quarrel which followed cut a certain
figure in the political chronicle of the time, the correspondence may
not be historically out of date, or biographically uninteresting: