After the New Hampshire primary, Donald Trump looks like he is going to make history in being one of only two Republicans nominated three times by the party, and if he wins the election, only the second president in history to serve non-consecutive terms. It will be a comeback like Cleveland’s. How did that go, anyway?
1888 was a year of sore disappointment for Democrats. In the previous presidential election, 1884, they had elected their first president since James Buchanan in 1856 (Andrew Johnson, although a Democrat, was not elected president). That year, the Republicans won back the White House with Benjamin Harrison. The victory was won in Cleveland’s home state of New York, thanks in large part to his campaign manager, Matthew Quay, carefully examining Tammany Hall activity thereby hindering their operations. What’s more, a letter appeared in the final two weeks of the election by British ambassador Sir Lionel Sackville-West to a “Charles F. Murchison” in response to his letter in which he identified himself as a naturalized American citizen from Britain regarding which candidates was best for British interests, in which he held that Cleveland was the optimal pick. This original letter was written by George Osgoodby, a California Republican, with the aim of getting a response to motivate Irish-Americans to vote Republican, which they did that election (Mitchell). In other words, a dirty trick played perhaps a decisive role in Harrison’s 1888 victory. However, by 1892 the political environment was quite different.
The 1888 election had produced unified government for the Republicans, and they pushed a controversial agenda in the 51st Congress. Passed was the unpopular McKinley Tariff as well as ways of spending the revenue from the tariff and out of the budget surplus that attracted public criticism. Republicans also pushed the Lodge Federal Elections bill to make the 15th Amendment an enforceable reality in the South. In addition to the use of violence and intimidation, means of depriving blacks of the ballot in the South included, according to Wendy Hazard (2004), “the stuffing of ballot boxes, tampering with returns, doctoring registration rolls, changing polling places without prior notification, and locating the polls miles from where African-Americans lived” (2). This measure was in equal parts a voting rights and an anti-fraud measure, so it would also cover political machines in major cities, but it died in the Senate due to Western Republican defections (Soderstrum). Democrats saw this as a blatantly partisan bill and unified in opposition, with Grover Cleveland making it a major issue of the 1892 campaign, denouncing as the “Force Bill”. Cleveland’s campaign also focused against tariffs, trusts, the 10% tax on state bank issues, and corporate control over public lands (through railroad grants).
The process of choosing a party nominee worked a bit differently back in 1892 than it does now with party primaries and caucuses, as nominations were decided at the party convention. Like with Trump, Cleveland did have those who challenged him, including Senator David Hill of New York and Iowa’s Democratic Governor Horace Boies. These people represented factions of the Democratic Party displeased with Cleveland’s policies in some way or another. Hill represented Tammany Hall’s dissatisfaction with Cleveland’s opposition to bossism. Boies represented the dissatisfaction of many Western and Southern Democrats over his opposition to free coinage of silver. However, Cleveland was seen as highly electable…after all he had been president before and won the popular vote in the 1888 election. What’s more, free coinage of silver was a plank guaranteed to lose in New York. Hill had the benefit of the great orator Bourke Cockran speaking against nominating Cleveland again, asserting that he was popular “every day in the year, except one, and that is election day… It is a popularity based upon the fact that his opponents speak well of him, but will not vote for him. So it is delusive. It may “arouse enthusiasm four months before election” but produces “disappointment for four years after election” (Troy). Despite this, the first ballot at the convention was not close; Cleveland pulled away with 617.33 votes, with his nearest rival, Hill, only mustering 114 votes and Boies following with 103. To win support from the supporters of free coinage of silver, Cleveland picked Adlai Stevenson I, a supporter of the policy, as his running mate. Stevenson would be doing much of the campaigning that year, as President Harrison was largely not campaigning due to his wife’s deteriorating health and Cleveland didn’t want to capitalize on his opponent’s absence himself. This election was also marked by the entry of a third-party candidate in Populist James B. Weaver. By the way, a third-party candidate who pulls significant support from the electorate is historically a bad development for the president’s party and 1892 was no exception. Weaver would win 22 electoral votes and the states of Colorado, Idaho, Nebraska, and Nevada while getting one electoral vote from North Dakota and Oregon each. Democrats had already had a strong House majority from the 1890 midterms and this was reduced although retained in 1892 and Democrats won the Senate that year.
References
1892 Democratic Party Platform. The American Presidency Project.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1892-democratic-party-platform
Hazard, W. (2004, August 1). Thomas Brackett Reed, Civil Rights, and the Fight for Fair Elections. Maine History, 42(1).
Retrieved from
Mitchell, R. (2018, June 20). The fake letter historians believe tipped a presidential election. The Washington Post.
Retrieved from
Soderstrum, T.J. Force Bill (1890). Reference Encyclopedia.
Retrieved from
https://reference.jrank.org/populism/Force_Bill_1890.html
Troy, G. (2018, January 28). W. Bourke Cockran, The Forgotten Democratic Congressman Who Championed Churchill & Free Trade. The Daily Beast.
Retrieved from
Mad Politics: The Bizarre, Fascinating, and Unknown of American Political History 
Great Job Mike! Most Timely.
Interesting THAT Third Party Candidates
Tend TO Hurt Party In The White House.
Likely To Be True This Year
Happy Sunday From Dave
Did You Receive Yesterdays Message ON Martin Dies?
Just Wondering.