The Elections of Grover Cleveland

Heather Cox Richardson

Grover Cleveland, by Anders Zorn, 1899.

On November 4, 1884, voters elected Grover Cleveland, the reform-minded governor of New York, to the White House. Today, people remember Cleveland primarily because he is the only president who served two non-consecutive terms. In fact, there was much more to Cleveland. He was a remarkably progressive and principled president, who tried to stop late 19th-century America from falling under the control of big business. Indeed, his opposition to the growing power of money in politics is the reason his terms were non-consecutive.

While we tend to forget it, Grover Cleveland actually captured the majority of the popular vote in 1884, 1892, and in 1888, the year he lost the election. In that year, despite a majority of about 100,000 votes, he lost to Benjamin Harrison in the Electoral College. This loss was not a random quirk of the American electoral system. Harrison’s men had been gunning for Cleveland from the day the 1884 election had been decided. Well aware that they could not win the popular vote, they focused on the Electoral College.

BioShock Infinite and Creative Anachronism

Randall Stephens

A screen capture from BioShock Infinite (Irrational Games, 2013)

I'm not proud to admit it . . . Sometimes I play video games.  And, no, I don't live in my mother's basement with black-light posters on the walls.  I don't subsist on Cheez Puffs, Slim Jims, and Mountain Dew. I have a job. I have a life.

Confession over.  

For non-gamers (lots of people), I'd like to say a little about a fun game that draws creatively off the past.

BioShock, which rolled out in 2007, was set in a disturbingly macabre, underwater, Ayn Randian dystopia. (Shooting libertarian fish in a barrel?) The submerged city, populated by psychopathic surgeons, genetically altered loonies, and a raft of creepy grotesqueries, is the gamer's playground, where she/he looks for clues and tries to set things right. Calamitous fun all around.

San Francisco, the 1906 Earthquake, and the Progressive Era

Heather Cox Richardson

Recently, workers in San Francisco unearthed the ruins of the old city hall, destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.

That event has always fascinated me—not just the destruction caused by the quake itself, but the sense it has always given me that San Francisco in 1906 was a perfect example of Progressive Era America. Some of the worst destruction was caused not by the shaking earth, but by the fires that broke out in the cracked gas lines. As much as 90% of the damage in San Francisco has been attributed to the fires. The thought of the flames roaring up the streets of the city is one of those events that makes history human . . . and in this case, horrific.