🎩Grover Cleveland

22nd & 24th President · 1885–1889, 1893–1897 · Democratic

Grover Cleveland is the only U.S. president to serve two non-consecutive terms, giving him both the 22nd and the 24th slot in the numbering. He was a reform-minded Democrat known for his honesty, his willingness to veto bills he considered unconstitutional (414 vetoes in his first term alone), and his insistence that the federal government had no business actively intervening in the economy. Donald Trump's 2024 victory made Cleveland no longer the only president with non-consecutive terms.

The Reformer

Cleveland was a Buffalo attorney who became mayor of Buffalo in 1881 and then governor of New York in 1882, compiling such a record of honesty and willingness to veto pork-barrel legislation that Democrats nominated him for president in 1884. His opponent was James G. Blaine, whose opponents (including many reform Republicans called "Mugwumps") crossed party lines to support Cleveland. Cleveland won despite a damaging scandal — he acknowledged having fathered a child out of wedlock years earlier.

First Term

Cleveland's first term emphasized fiscal restraint, lower tariffs, and vigorous use of the veto. He vetoed hundreds of private pension bills for Civil War veterans that he thought fraudulent. He married 21-year-old Frances Folsom in the White House in 1886, becoming the only president to marry in the White House and the only one married in office. He lost his 1888 re-election bid to Republican Benjamin Harrison despite winning the popular vote — one of five such losses.

Comeback

Cleveland returned to private law practice and then won the rematch with Harrison in 1892, becoming the first president elected to non-consecutive terms. Shortly after his inauguration, the Panic of 1893 hit — one of the worst economic depressions in American history up to that point. Cleveland's response was orthodox and limited: he fought to keep the country on the gold standard and repealed silver purchase legislation, alienating the silver-favoring wing of his own party.

Pullman and Venezuela

The Pullman Strike of 1894 paralyzed rail traffic across the Midwest. Cleveland sent federal troops to break the strike over the objections of Illinois Governor John Altgeld. In foreign policy, he asserted U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere in a boundary dispute with Britain over Venezuela. The 1896 Democratic convention repudiated Cleveland, nominating William Jennings Bryan on a silver platform instead.

Cleveland Trivia

• Cleveland and Donald Trump are the only two U.S. presidents to serve two non-consecutive terms.
• He secretly underwent surgery for a tumor in his jaw aboard a friend's yacht in 1893 to hide his illness from the public during the Panic.
• He is the only president to have been married in the White House.
• Cleveland's daughter Ruth, nicknamed "Baby Ruth," was born in the White House; the candy bar is unrelated (named much later).

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