Product Description

Grover Cleveland: A Study in Character is the first comprehensive study of our 22nd and 24th president in nearly seventy years. This distinguished leader, the only Democrat elected to the presidency between the Civil War and World War I, rose to political prominence through the ranks of mayor of Buffalo and governor of New York before his election to this nation's highest office.

Always concerned with the majority, never the favored few, Cleveland believed his ultimate allegiance was to the nation, not to a political party, and he acted on his strongly-held beliefs throughout his entire political life. At first considered an enemy of labor because of his firm handling of the bloody Chicago Pullman strike, many historians have overlooked Cleveland's numerous accomplishments, including his heroic quest to improve the quality of life for American Indians, his battles against the railroads and big business to prevent the destruction of American land, and his insistence on tariff reduction and remaining on the Gold Standard, which saved the nation from bankruptcy. The only president to be elected to two nonconsecutive terms, Grover Cleveland was the only president to be married in the White House and also the first to have a child in the White House.

Brodsky's engrossing work follows Grover Cleveland through his early life in upstate New York, his career as a trial lawyer, mayor, and governor through to his first and second presidencies and his last years as a lecturer and beloved member of the administration at Princeton University. Each chapter will cause readers to reevaluate our perception of this underrated President who, in his dying words said, "I tried so hard to do right," and to evaluate him in the context of his successors.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #714724 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 512 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This admiring (indeed near-hagiographic) revisionist biography seeks to portray Grover ClevelandAthe only Democrat elected to the presidency between the Civil War and WWI-as a model of integrity and honor: "To compare Cleveland with our four most deplorable post-Harding presidentsANixon, Reagan, Bush, and ClintonAis to contrast a paradigm of virtue with the quintessence of duplicity." Brodsky, a historian and book critic for the Miami Herald and other papers, praises this Presbyterian minister's son for attacking corruption, cleaning up the civil service, enacting tariff and pension reforms and opposing the spoliation of the West by a land-grabbing clique of railroads, cattle barons and lumber companies. Yet Cleveland was basically a political and social conservative. Though he ran for president in 1884 as one who would challenge the power of monopolies and big business, once in office, he essentially served their interests. Cleveland called out federal troops to crush the Chicago Pullman strike in 1894 (12 were killed, 515 arrested). Brodsky lamely argues that Cleveland was sympathetic to the labor movement, but saw his primary duty as upholding the law, ensuring mail delivery and supporting interstate commerce. The author justifiably praises our 22nd/24th president as an anti-imperialist who refused to recognize a Hawaiian government set up largely by U.S. planters, yet he concedes that, in foreign affairs, Cleveland's achievements were insignificant. Cleveland may arguably have been the best president between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, but that's not saying much, and this earnest if colorful biography fails to provide the kind of hard-nosed reassessment that might restore the luster to a president whose missteps severely weakened the Democratic Party for decades. Photos. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Grover Cleveland bought his way out of the Civil War draft, may have fathered an illegitimate daughter, and married someone 27 years his junior. Whereas some may see a theme in these events that helps explain his later conservative Victorian behavior, popular historian Brodsky (The Kings Depart; Madame Lunch & Friend) writes an old-fashioned political biography of America's 22d and 24th chief executiveDthe first major one in more than a half-century. He regards the split-term president as the nation's most underrated chief executive and the best of the eight who served between Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. In the short run, notes Brodsky, Cleveland lost public favor but lived long enough to regain it. On the other hand, his workaholic and inflexible style often undermined his effectiveness. Except for an occasional negative comparison to some recent contemporary presidents, this account is balanced, readable, and worthwhile. Recommended for public and academic libraries.DWilliam D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
When laypersons think of President Grover Cleveland, they usually recall his fathering of an illegitimate child ("Ma, Ma, where's my pa . . .")^B or the fact that he was the only U.S. president elected to two nonconsecutive terms. Of course, there was much more substance to both the man and his administrations. Brodsky, a book reviewer and university-trained historian, has provided a comprehensive and almost uniformly favorable account of Cleveland's public life and private character. This is a rather solemn, slow-moving biography that frequently gets bogged down in irrelevant details. In his zeal to illustrate Cleveland's virtues, Brodsky is a bit too eager to stress his "positive" accomplishments. For example, he suggests that the Dawes Act, depriving Native Americans of their language and tribal identity as well as their land, was actually a progressive move. Still, this is a useful and well-researched work that makes a strong case that Cleveland was a scrupulously honest politician and an effective president who resisted the entrenched power of railroad magnates and land developers to protect the public interest. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Honoring and Honorable Man
A first rate biography of the only man to win two non-consecutive terms as U. S. president and one who captured the popular vote three consecutive times. Brodsky has struck a good stylistic balance between the readable and the informative, between bringing to an engaging personality to life and rendering an accurate historical narrative. It is the finest Cleveland biography since Allan Nevins' definitive work of nearly seventy years ago. I anxiously await his forthcoming work on Cleveland's wife, Frances, one of the more remarkable first ladies who figures predominantly in the current work.

Welcome, but only adequate
Despite the vast number of professors of American History in our colleges and universities, it's hard to find biographies of many of our presidents. Therefore, we must be grateful for Brodsky's "Grover Cleveland." It is a readable, but not scholarly treatment of Cleveland and his presidencies. Brodsky, almost always sympathetic to Cleveland, effects a good balance between the personal and political, and is especially good in dealing with Cleveland's retirement years. His treatment of the presidencies concentrates on several principal issues like the tariff and silver controversies, and the Pullman strike. I would have wished for greater detail of the presidential years, the election campaigns, and fuller sketches of Cleveland's allies and competitors. I don't want to be too harsh about the book's comprehensiveness because I don't think Brodsky had any pretensions about writing a full academic biography. Accepting the book as a popular biography, I wish Brodsky were a more elegant writer. The book would have benefitted from tighter editing, if only to curb some of Brodsky's graceless metaphors. Nonetheless, it can be recommended in view of the dearth of available biographies of President Cleveland.

An Absorbing, If Stolid, Elegy
Let's not make more of this than it is: as sturdy and stolid as its subject, it's a lengthy paean to a clearly above-average President and a round condemnation of the Gilded Age in which he so earnestly labored. If you take this 'biography' on its terms, you may be charmed by Alyn Brodsky's plain spoken affinity for the man, his very young wife, and those generally fine men around him. But this is no true biography, it is a popular history and a mid-length life and times. To the author's credit, he makes no pretense otherwise. Here even Cleveland's surreptitious jaw cancer surgery, a well-kept secret for a quarter century, is not a malicious deception, but virtually the cross the great and good man deems right to bear in silence. The President's firm stands, fist slammed down on his desk, on the thorny issues of the day - high tariffs, gold standard, Hawaiian misadventure, veteran pensions, monopolistic practices, treatment of minorities - are all placed in a context of good civic ethics. This would be too much puffery were it not for Brodsky's sound defense, well researched, of Cleveland's thoughtful positions and sincerity as contrasted with his rivals'. Of course, in relation to such virtual or literal crooks and fools as Arthur, Blaine ('Continental Liar from the State of Maine'), Harrison ('is he as small as all that?'), Hanna ("king maker"), McKinley ("a bronze statue looking for his pedestal"), Tammany Hall, the robber barons, and Bryan, Cleveland is every inch (and pound) the hero. In sum, a worthy read, always absorbing, at times elevating.