At a time when the financial clouds were gathering last spring, a little company of politicians, who were personal friends as well, called upon Mr. Cleveland by appointment, and were received in that upper chamber through which for many days a persistent procession filed before the President asking for office. Mr. Cleveland planted himself firmly for an instant before each supplicant, so firmly that it almost seemed to these friends of his standing a little way off that his determination to be persuaded by no appeal to emotion, gratitude, friendship, or by any other thing than fitness revealed itself even in the rigidness of the muscles of his body. Patiently listening to each request and making perfunctory response, the President then received the next and then the next, and no man of all that number who thus met him knew whether his plea had met with favor or refusal. At last the throng was gone, the doors were closed, and there came to the face of the President a strange, hard look, tinged with something of surprise, and turning to his friends who remained he threw himself wearily into his chair and was silent for a moment. When he spoke there was something of sadness, something of reproach, in his tone and manner, and he said:
“You have seen a picture which I see every day, and you may now know why it is that my ears must be deaf to such appeals; why I scarcely hear the words they speak; why I almost fear that with most men who seek with great persistence political office the sense of truth is apt to be blunted, and why, therefore, it is imperative for me to be always suspicious.” Then the President added, with something of indignation:
“But how any man who is a good citizen can come to me now and plead for office, when there is impending financial calamity, I cannot understand. Politics! Is it possible that the politicians do not see that the best as well as the imperative politics now is that which will bring the country back to financial prosperity?”
Some hours later, one of that company had another glimpse of the President. Washington was still for the night. The White House was dark, excepting for a light that burned in the room where the President works. At his desk sat the man who had said in the morning that his ears were deaf to the office-seekers’ appeals, and yet with patient drudgery he was now examining the indorsements and recommendations of the different applicants, as he had been doing for hours. Then, taking up his pen, he began to write. The pen seemed scarcely ever to stop, and, watching through the partly opened door that led into an outer office, the President’s friend was reminded by it of something which he had read or heard. “Where have I heard or seen something which that sight brings to my memory?” he asked himself. The impression remained with him after he left Washington, until at last, taking down from his library shelf a biography, he read this passage:
“Since we sat down I have been watching a hand which I see behind the window of that room across the street. It fascinates my eye; it never stops. Page after page is finished and put upon a heap of manuscript, and still the hand goes on unwearied, and so it will be till candles are brought, and God knows how long after that. It is the same every night. I well know what hand it is—’tis Walter Scott’s.”
Cleveland is not, however, indifferent to political organization. He believes in it; he supports it. That was revealed at the conference which he held in October, 1892, in the Victoria Hotel, with some of the leaders of what is called the Democratic machine in New York. Some time there will be a revelation of what was said and done there in all detail, and it will furnish important light upon Mr. Cleveland’s character as well as his more purely political capacity. This much is known: that he did there and with emphasis maintain the right and duty of party men to form associations, to submit to discipline, and to act by common agreement—in other words, to use a colloquialism, he “recognized the machine.” But he also made one magnificent manifestation of that higher quality of his which is his character, for when there was something like threatening intimation made by one of those present, Mr. Cleveland declared that rather than do the thing that was asked of him he would withdraw from the ticket, and the country would know why he had withdrawn; and, after he said that, he held those men who had dared to make such intimation of threat subdued and supple in the hollow of his fist, from which condition they have not strayed from that day to this.
He would have been a failure in the House of Representatives as a parliamentary leader, probably a failure as a debater. The parliamentary leader is for his party always, right or wrong, and Mr. Cleveland could never have assumed command incurring such responsibilities as that. His intellectual processes are not quick enough for the give and take of debate. Blaine or Garfield, Randall or Thurman, would have overmatched him. Probably no member of either House has more greatly interested him than Mr. Reed, who in all respects, excepting personal force, differs from him. Each has expressed something of regard for the personal qualities of the other, and there has come to light a keen interest in Mr. Cleveland’s eyes as friends have described Reed, the parliamentary leader and debater, to him. He has never seen Reed standing in the aisle just beyond his desk, a throng of associates with hot, eager faces surrounding him, he towering above them, his head thrust slightly forward and a little to one side, a half-whimsical, half-defiant curl upon his lips, and the sneer of the coming sarcasm already betrayed by suggestive swelling of his nostrils; or else with the placid, serene, and tantalizing composure with which he prepares to hurl an epigram, already in his mind, at his antagonists. Nor has Mr. Cleveland seen that readiness to deliver almost tiger-like ferocity of attack if it be needed. The black flag—no quarter asked or given—hoisted when necessary, that furious, all-controlling, unconquerable determination to win, to beat down opposition at all hazards and any cost except outright dishonor, straining even a little toward unfair advantage when that and nothing else will win, and expecting to meet unfairness in return; bent on winning—somehow, anyhow, but winning—Mr. Cleveland has never seen such impressive spectacle as Reed makes when at his finest as the champion of his party in parliamentary battle and debate. But they have told him of these things, and he has seemed not to tire, but to delight to hear them.
He could not do that. He would stand by a principle or fall with it. Reed might beat him down in a turbulent body like the House, but he would go down like Galileo, crying, “But the world DOES move!”
Mr. Cleveland has himself recognized this intellectual defect, if it be one, for last spring, when a company of New York friends were speaking to him about the financial condition, he said, with great earnestness, “I do not quite see where I am; I must have time;” and then added a favorite expression of his, “My head is in a bag now; I cannot see clearly.” But these men, when they heard him say this, realized that when he did see clearly, as he believed, then his convictions would become established, and it would almost be as easy to move the earth from its axis as to shift him from them.
When he met his first cabinet, there were gathered around the table two men of extraordinary brilliancy of intellect, another of splendid repute and vast experience, and all of them were men of perhaps finer intellectual quality, and certainly had many advantages, both natural and acquired, which he did not possess. Yet Secretary Whitney, speaking of this meeting to an old college friend of his, some time after, said, “When we met the President in the cabinet room, we had not been there ten minutes before we realized that ‘Where MacGregor sat, there was the head of the table.’” Whitney himself was the only member of the cabinet who was younger than Cleveland, and three members of it had been active in public life before Cleveland was admitted to the bar.