Grover Cleveland’s name has popped up on these pages, so I thought I would share some interesting stories about him.

From New York State, Cleveland was the first Democrat and first man who had not served in the military to get elected president since the Civil War. He was also the first president to serve two non-consecutive terms.

Cleveland was a lawyer and working as a prosecutor when he dodged the draft (legally), by hiring an immigrant to fight in his place. Probably, like many Democrats, he wasn’t a big fan of the conflict anyway.

Being a draft dodger did not seem to hurt him much politically. In 1865, he narrowly lost the race for Erie County, New York, District Attorney to the Republican candidate, who also happened to be his roommate (Cleveland was a bachelor until later in life). However, just five years later, he was elected Sheriff of Erie County, a job that had the somber responsibility of hanging the condemned. During his term, two people were sentenced to death for murder. While he could have subcontracted someone else to do the work, he refused to. That might have been a mistake, as unfortunately, he botched the second execution. The condemned suffered over twenty minutes as he slowly strangled to death, instead of dying instantly.

Despite being called the “Buffalo Hangman” by his foes, Cleveland advanced in his political career. During this time, he was known for taking on the corrupt bosses in his own political party and was seen as a political reformer. A nickname his supporters had for him was “Grover the Good.”

Cleveland maintained a law practice with a close friend, Oscar Folsom. Cleveland was devastated when Folsom died in a traffic accident in 1875. Yeah, a traffic accident. You know how people drive like assholes now in their cars? They also used to drive like assholes with their carriages.

Being the good man that he was, Cleveland looked after the man’s family, which consisted of Folsom’s widow, Emma, and his eleven-year-old daughter, Frances. Cleveland helped to oversee her education and was a mentor to her as well.

After being elected Governor of New York, Cleveland took a shot at running for President. He got the Democratic Nomination in 1884. His opponents attacked him because he had a child out of wedlock. Cleveland explained that the mother was a loose woman and as he was the only single man among his friends, he claimed paternity of the child. He even named the boy after his dead law partner, Oscar Folsom, and provided for him financially. He was single and the mother was single (a widow), so most voters didn’t mind.

The woman in question had a different story. She accused Cleveland of raping her. And when she did, he had her placed in an insane asylum. They released her when they realized she was not crazy, only drunk. What really happened? Who knows? But while his opponents mocked him with cries of “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa?”, if I had been running Republican James G. Blaine’s campaign, I would have called him, “Grover the Widow Rapist.” Sure, it doesn’t rhyme, but you have to admit, it’s much more compelling.

Speaking of James G. Blaine, he had his own problems with public corruption, so the voters weren’t really left with great choices. We can only imagine what that was like. With the south securely Democratic and much of the north securely Republican, the election came down to the swing state of New York. There were a lot of first and second-generation immigrants there from Catholic countries, so when Blaine was merely present at a sermon where the Protestant minister railed against the Democrats as being the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” he was branded as anti-Catholic. And while Blaine was never known to dislike anyone based on religion (he had plenty of Catholic family members), the Democrats still bashed him for it and New York voted for Cleveland.

While in the White House, Grover the Good didn’t forget about his late friend’s widow and daughter. He invited Emma Folsom, still single, and her then twenty-one-year-old daughter, Frances, who was a student at Wells College, to visit him. Many people thought that Cleveland, also still single, would propose to his late friend’s wife. But Grover did what you would expect any decent single forty-eight-year-old man to do when seeing the twenty-one-year-old girl he helped to raise.

He proposed and she accepted. Everyone was surprised, especially Frances’s mother, but no one had much of a problem with it. It’s not like he was still in a position of authority over her or that he lied about it under oath in a sexual harassment lawsuit.

Drunk History has a pretty accurate and funny take on this. It makes Frances out to be a crusader for women. In many ways, she was, except that she later strongly opposed women’s suffrage.

The young couple had five children together. And if you know anything about history or have read my blog, you would be right to expect that not all of them made it. Their daughter Ruth died in 1904 at age 12, probably from something that would be completely treatable today. Grover died a few years later, while his wife, as you would expect, lived many more years.

People would have just forgotten about Ruth Cleveland, except in the early 1920s, a candy company in Chicago wanted to make money off of a then-popular baseball player from Baltimore, Babe Ruth. But they didn’t want to pay him. They got around this by claiming that the “Baby Ruth” wasn’t named after Babe Ruth, but Ruth Cleveland. This made sense, except the owners of the company had no connection to the Cleveland family, Ruth had been dead for almost two decades, and she wasn’t a baby when she died. But somehow it worked.

So when you see a Baby Ruth, you can think about the sleazy candy makers who decided to profit off of Babe Ruth, without paying him, by pretending that their candy bar was named after a dead girl. And you can also be reminded of the only draft-dodging, womanizing, politician from New York who took on the corrupt leadership of his own party to win two non-consecutive terms in the White House. So far.

Side notes: Grover Cleveland’s grandson is still alive. And if that doesn’t feel weird enough, so is a grandson of President Tyler.

And for a Truxtun Beale reference, this was the resignation letter Beale sent to President Cleveland, who was the incoming President in 1893. It was accepted a few months later when his replacement was confirmed. Beale wanted to get back home anyway.