Victor Davis Hanson talks with Troy Senik about his new book, A Man of Iron, a biography of President Grover Cleveland.
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Victor Davis Hanson talks with Troy Senik about his new book, A Man of Iron, a biography of President Grover Cleveland.
Cleveland may only have held up the annexation of Hawaii, and he didn’t get much help from the Hawaiian queen in trying to preserve her kingdom, but it was a noble effort just the same, and obviously Troy Senik thought so as well.
This was a five-star biography and deserves a massive readership.
A US govt website notes:
“In foreign affairs, Bayard [Cleveland’s Secretary of State in his first term] intervened in the ongoing disputes over U.S. fishing rights in Canada and Newfoundland. Following the expiration of an 1871 agreement, the U.S. Government had attempted to negotiate a treaty with Canada and Great Britain in early 1888. However, the hunting of fur seals in the Bering Sea had become a contentious issue, and relations were further complicated by an unclear land and sea boundary division between Alaska and Canada. The U.S. Senate ultimately rejected the terms of the treaty. Bayard continued to pursue negotiations with the British Government, but the issue would not be resolved until a 1903 treaty.” It didn’t bother me as a Canadian that Troy Senik made no mention of this in biography. If he was going to throw everything that happened in the Cleveland presidency into his book it would be three or four times as long, and I doubt that I would have read it.
I agree with Troy that probably Cleveland’s greatest achievement was to halt the Free Silver initiative in his second term. You can make a good intellectual case for bimetallism and even more for symmetalism, which the great English economist Alfred Marshall favoured, but in 1893 the time there was basically no hope that the US could negotiate an international treaty to have the major powers adopt bimetallism and the potential for the Free Silver movement to create runaway inflation in the US was very real.
After reading a glowing review of this book in the Wall Street Journal I purchased the book and, after starting to read it, couldn’t put it down. Excellent book; Cleveland’s meteoric rose to the presidency appears to be an electorates’ response to perceived corruption in all levels of government…almond with the South voting as a block for Democrats.
Highly recommend the book.
I think that it would have been helpful for Mr. Senik to have spelled out the name of his media company. I thought it was two words like “Keiton Key” until I looked him up on Byte.
I didn’t think that having an older man marry a young woman was all that unusual in the Victorian Age when the man was prominent. In fact, it appears to be typical from books and movies I have encountered.
I question the image of Jimmy Carter being personally favorable; from the utter hypocrisy of carrying his empty suitcase to make a point to the Secret Service dislike of both him and Rosalind (the one who poured the wine back into bottles after White House dinners to reserve it later).