Stephen Grover Cleveland
Grover Cleveland’s reputation begins with a sentence he repeats so often it stops sounding like a slogan and starts sounding like a moral reflex: public office is a public trust. The phrase is spare, almost severe, and it reflects a sensibility forged not in salons or at universities, but in parsonages, law offices, and municipal chambers where the nearest romance is the romance of balancing a column of numbers. He is born Stephen Grover Cleveland in Caldwell, New Jersey, the son of a Presbyterian minister whose sermons leave the family as rich in admonition as they are poor in cash. Early on he learns two permanent lessons: that work is both duty and shelter, and that respectability is not a costume but a habit. When his father dies, the boy goes to work rather than to college, finding in Buffalo a ladder made from law books and late nights, apprenticing in the old way—read, copy, draft, argue—until the trade is not a trick but a muscle. He is not a virtuoso; he is a metronome. Clients trust him because his sentences carry weight that is not borrowed from anyone else’s name, and because he treats details as if they are the only place where justice will stand quietly long enough to be measured.
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