How Governors Built the Modern American Presidency. Saladin M. Ambar
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of Cleveland's presidency. Indeed, Horace Samuel Merrill's summation of Cleveland as a “narrow legalist” is not so much wrong as it is incomplete.72 Cleveland's governorship and presidency—particularly his first term—demonstrate a stronger affinity for executive leadership and power than he is often given credit (or damnation) for. It was Cleveland, as governor-president, who contributed mightily to the governing philosophy of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. And it was Cleveland's Democratic interregnum that presaged the preemptive politics of late twentieth-century presidencies such as Bill Clinton's.73 Most importantly, Cleveland's use of executive authority helped strengthen the presidency and reinforce the idea of the president as both national and legislative leader. FDR would look to Cleveland's presidency on occasion for insights, without provocation, and certainly without a Bourbon agenda in mind.74
It was during Cleveland's first term that he invoked “executive privilege,” employing this still somewhat exotic constitutional concept more forcefully than any president to that point during peacetime. Alyn Brodsky has called it “Cleveland's greatest achievement: retrieving for the executive branch many of the prerogatives that had fallen to the legislative branch through a succession of presidential mediocrities.”75 The impetus for Cleveland's claim was the Tenure of Office Act. Congress had passed this piece of legislation in its effort to derail the Democratic presidency of Andrew Johnson; the act effectively turned over all removal authority to the United States Senate, detaching it from the president's appointive powers. As David A. Crockett has recounted:
In February, 1886, the Senate began asking the administration for information regarding executive branch suspensions. Citing the advice-and-consent clause, Cleveland sent only information on appointments, while retaining confidential letters and documents. The president himself would be the judge of whether such things could be released to the Senate. The Senate replied saying it would block all future appointments, and the stage was set for a showdown. Cleveland then sent a public message to the Senate, arguing that the Senate had no constitutional authority over dismissals and suspensions, and that sending confidential documents about appointments would embarrass and injure the president and his advisors, who would be unable to offer frank advice.76
Cleveland delivered a response to the Senate essentially declaring the Tenure of Office Act unconstitutional, arguing he was “not responsible to the Senate” concerning dismissals.77 Cleveland ultimately prevailed, signing the repeal of the Tenure of Office Act in March of 1887 and restoring balance to executive-legislative relations.78 In true progressive fashion, Cleveland would later claim he helped free “the presidency from the Senate's claim of tutelage,” making the office “again the independent agent of the people.”79 While Cleveland's act was restorative, it was also, in a sense, precedent-setting. As one Hayes biographer concluded, “The modern presidency does not begin with Grover Cleveland, but Cleveland made a necessary contribution to its development when he contested the claims of the Republican Senate and thereby helped to right the balance between the legislative and the executive branches of the federal government.”80
Similarly, Cleveland's Bourbonism must be qualified when examining another aspect of his executive performance. Cleveland was anything but conservative in his use of the presidential veto, exercising it more than any other president but FDR, who governed nearly twice as long.81 Prior to the presidency, Cleveland was known first as the “Veto Mayor” of Buffalo and then as New York's “Veto Governor.” His willingness to favor strong executive government countered his self-proclaimed Whiggish sentiments.82 His 301 first-term vetoes were a record, and his combined total of 584 dwarfed the combined bills vetoed prior to his terms in office (132). Cleveland's most controversial veto while governor was employed to defend legalistic and high-minded purposes. His veto of the five-cent fare bill drew in a young assemblyman, Theodore Roosevelt, forging an early bipartisan alliance with the “twenty-five year old rising star of the Republican Party and a leader of its reform wing.”83
Cleveland's deep and studious analysis of the bill convinced him that, while a boon to a public desperate for affordable public services, it was nevertheless unconstitutional; if passed, it would negate a contract between the state and the wealthy Jay Gould, who owned the elevated line in question. Gould stood to benefit greatly by keeping the fare at ten cents. “The State must not only be strictly just, but scrupulously fair,” Cleveland said in his speech to the assembly.84 Cleveland's principled stand earned him great respect and admiration for his political courage, not the least of which from Roosevelt. Both Cleveland and TR benefited from their early reform alliance, with the two future presidents depicted by one cartoonist as presiding over the demise of the Tammany Hall “tiger.”85 While Cleveland's Bourbon democracy may be critiqued for its establishment biases, Cleveland's liberal use of the veto became a hallmark of modern executive leadership, the modern presidency, and a singular contribution of later governor-presidents.86 Such a prolific use of the veto necessarily tempers the one-dimensional view of Cleveland as legislatively neutral or weak. FDR, for one, took evident pride in being linked with Cleveland—both as president and as New York governor—through their shared proclivity to veto. “It is to me tremendously interesting,” noted Roosevelt in a letter to Cleveland's widow in 1941, “that President Cleveland and I seem to have a veto record not even approached by anyone else in the White House.” Mindful of their similarly high veto tallies in Albany, Roosevelt concluded, “I am very happy in the association which this record brings out.”87
Of the top quartile of vetoes given between 1829 and 2000, governorpresidents account for 70 percent.88 And though governor-presidents make up less than 40 percent of all presidents, they account for a surprising 64 percent of all presidential vetoes. The following chart puts the Cleveland veto record in perspective. While a preeminent vetoer, Cleveland was part of a cadre of governor-presidents whose use of the veto was unparalleled in American history.
Even when controlling for Cleveland's and FDR's vetoes, governorpresidents still veto disproportionately, accounting for over half of all presidential vetoes. More to the point, however, is the fact that Cleveland's executive background was hardly incidental to his behavior as president. Cleveland's deep executive experience is emblematic of the influential role executive background has played in presidential behavior. As Cleveland biographer H. Paul Jeffers recounts:
[Buffalo's City Council] crowned Grover Cleveland with a halo of political courage and enshrined his street-cleaning veto as the beginning of the most astonishing and rapid ascent from political obscurity to the pinnacle of governmental power in the annals of the United States. American historians and Cleveland biographers agree that if the Buffalo Common council had overridden the veto of the street-cleaning contract, Grover Cleveland could not that very year [1882], have become governor of New York, and only two years after that, have been elected the twenty-second President of the United States.89
Purely quantitative analyses of presidential vetoes tell only part of the story of the modern presidency. At a minimum, the veto record of former governors in the White House begs a reconsideration of the role of executive background in presidential politics. Certainly, behind Cleveland's use of the veto was the belief that it was the executive's responsibility to provide honest and efficient government to the people. Theda Skocpol is also correct in pointing out that Cleveland's presidential veto record was strongly tied to his antagonism toward the costs of veterans' pensions.90 But Cleveland's veto record before the presidency clearly aligns with his later use of the veto as part of a broader executive philosophy, one increasingly shared by state executives at the time. This emergent theory of executive power was matched by shifting constitutional dynamics in the states as the executive veto grew in strength and popularity.91 Cleveland himself saw an inherently popular role in the executive function, and this sentiment guided his attacks on Tammany Hall and the New York Democratic political boss of the time, John Kelley. As H. Wayne Morgan has pointed out about Cleveland's governorship, “Every ringing veto enlarged his public aura of honesty and independence from bread-and-butter Democrats.”92 To be sure, the use of the veto among presidents since Eisenhower has less to do with executive philosophy than with divided government. But this was not true during the rise of the modern presidency, when the warrants to veto were far more restricted, and, when