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: