Chapter 1: A Rough Spot
It was not an auspicious moment to assume the presidency, and Grover Cleveland knew it. "I hope the skies will lighten up by and by," he'd written a friend a few weeks earlier, "but I have never seen a day since I consented to drift with events that I have not cursed myself for yielding." He was about to take the reins of a nation teetering on the brink of chaos. The economy was in ruins. Unemployment was rampant. Stock prices were plummeting. Banks and factories were closing by the score. Just nine days earlier, the once mighty Reading Railroad had gone bankrupt. More and bigger businesses were sure to follow the Reading into insolvency. Foreign investors who had flooded the country with capital after the Civil War were retreating like Lee from Gettysburg.
The Panic of 1893 was underway. It would spawn the worst economic catastrophe in American history, unsurpassed until the Great Depression.
Cleveland, who was just two weeks shy of his fifty-sixth birthday, emerged from the hotel at eleven o'clock that morning and climbed into a gleaming black carriage for the short ride to the Executive Mansion. Though he weighed nearly three hundred pounds, Cleveland moved with an easy grace that belied his massive girth. Just under six feet tall, nearly rectangular in shape, with thinning brown hair combed straight back and a big walrus moustache, Grover Cleveland was, figuratively and literally, the biggest political figure of his generation.
Wrapped in a long, black overcoat with a velvet collar, Cleveland rode the open carriage to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There he called on President Benjamin Harrison. Four years earlier, their roles had been reversed: Cleveland was the outgoing president, Harrison the incoming. The two men spent a few minutes in the Blue Room discussing the transition and then climbed into another open carriage for the mile-long ride down Pennsylvania Avenue to the inauguration ceremony at the Capitol. On the way they chatted amiably about the weather. Eight years earlier, in 1885, the sun had shone so brightly on Cleveland's first inauguration that "Cleveland weather" became a national catchphrase for a sunny day. But there would be no Cleveland weather on this day, for, as one congressman recalled, the conditions were "as bad as mortal man ever endured, windy, stormy, sleety, icy."
When they reached the Capitol, Cleveland and Harrison went inside the Senate chamber for the swearing in of Vice President Adlai Stevenson. (Stevenson was the grandfather of the 1952 and 1956 Democratic presidential nominee of the same name.) Many dignitaries were delayed by the weather, and it was nearly one thirty--ninety minutes late — before the festivities moved outside for Cleveland to take his own oath. A wooden platform draped with bunting had been erected at the bottom of the steps on the east side of the Capitol. About ten thousand people stood shivering on the frozen ground to watch the ceremony. Frances Cleveland, Grover's wildly popular wife, was one of the first to emerge from the Capitol. As soon as she appeared, a huge cheer went up — the loudest of the day, according to some observers. Frances took special care walking down the slippery marble steps to her seat on the platform, for, unbeknownst to anyone outside her family, the once and soon-to-be First Lady was two months pregnant.
Then came members of the outgoing and incoming cabinets, the nine Supreme Court justices, and assorted foreign diplomats in plumed hats. Finally, Harrison and Cleveland emerged, walking down the steps side by side. Harrison took his seat in a plush leather chair in the front row, while Cleveland removed his top hat and, without introduction or fanfare, walked up to the front of the platform. Snow had started falling again. Cleveland held his hat in his left hand. Facing a sea of black umbrellas, he launched into his second inaugural address.
Cleveland was one of the most famous public speakers of his time. Befitting a man of his size, he had a booming voice — stentorian, as the papers liked to say. He once gave a speech to twenty thousand people at the old Madison Square Garden, and, it was reported, every single one of them could hear every single word. And he always delivered his speeches from memory, without so much as notes. His memory was said to be photographic. One newspaper reported that he could "repeat pages of poetry or of prose, after a single reading."
But even a bellowing Grover Cleveland could not overcome Mother Nature. Without the benefit of artificial amplification, his words were scattered by the howling wind. The speech lasted about twenty minutes. The frigid crowd barely heard a word of it.
Which is too bad, because, as inaugural speeches go, it wasn't half bad. He railed against "the waste of public money," and he gave one of the most unequivocal calls for civil rights that had ever been expressed in an inaugural, though it was expressed in his typically cumbersome way: "Loyalty to the principles upon which our government rests positively demands that the equality before the law which it guarantees to every citizen should be justly and in good faith conceded in all parts of the land. The enjoyment of this right follows the badge of citizenship wherever found, and, unimpaired by race or color, it appeals for recognition to American manliness and fairness."
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That same day, May 5, Cleveland noticed for the first time a rough spot on the roof of his mouth. It was near his molars on the left side — his "cigar chewing side." He assumed it was nothing more serious than a minor dental problem, and given all he had on his plate at the time — the panic, the money question, the office seekers, Frances's pregnancy — it's hardly surprising he chose to ignore it. Accounts differ as to whether the spot was painful, but by mid-June it had grown so large that it began to worry the president deeply. As Frances recalled many years later, it "often caused him to walk to floor at night." When Frances inspected the spot, she saw what she called a "peculiar lesion."
Excerpted from The President Is a Sick Man: Wherein the Supposedly Virtuous Grover Cleveland Survives a Secret Surgery at Sea and Vilifies the Courageous Newspaperman Who Dared Exposed the Truth by Matthew Algeo. Copyright 2011 Chicago Review Press. Reprinted with permission of Chicago Review Press.
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