THE OTHER TWO-TERM POTUS NOT SERIALLY ELECTED: 6/8: A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency o1 Grover Cleveland Hardcover – by Troy Senik (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 11 November 2024
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Man-Iron-Turbulent-Improbable-Presidency/dp/1982140747?ref_=ast_author_dp#customerReviews
Grover Cleveland’s political career—a dizzying journey that saw him rise from obscure lawyer to president of the United States in just three years—was marked by contradictions. A politician of uncharacteristic honesty and principle, he was nevertheless dogged by secrets from his personal life. A believer in limited government, he pushed presidential power to its limits to combat a crippling depression, suppress labor unrest, and resist the forces of American imperialism. A headstrong executive who alienated Congress, political bosses, and even his own party, his stubbornness nevertheless became the key to his political appeal. The most successful Democratic politician of his era, he came to be remembered most fondly by Republicans.
1892
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchel with Troy Sennick, a man of iron, the turbulent life and improbable presidency of Grover, Cleveland, 22nd, and now 24th President of the United States. |
| 0:14.4 | It's the spring of 1893. There's a panic, what we call a recession, onto a depression. |
| 0:22.8 | What drives it, Troy? |
| 0:24.8 | Where does it begin? |
| 0:27.8 | At the risk of oversimplified, because this is a complicated issue, but complicated in a way that will bore your audience to tears. |
| 0:33.9 | I'm too in depth about it. |
| 0:35.2 | This goes back to the same conversation that we were having about |
| 0:38.9 | by metalism. There's an injection of silver into the economy and really what you see in the panic of |
| 0:44.8 | 1893, which is referred to in its day, by the way, as the Great Depression. This is the biggest |
| 0:50.3 | depression the country has seen up to that point is an instability and an instability |
| 0:55.6 | that plagues the country for years and a lot of it has to do with the fact that the country |
| 0:59.5 | being on the gold standard is obliged to keep a certain amount of gold in the bank at all times. |
| 1:05.6 | But as you mentioned earlier, part of the problem here is that you've got gold and silver in the |
| 1:10.1 | market at the same time and they're not worth the same amount. So anybody in this set of circumstances going to be |
| 1:15.9 | hoarding the gold, which is the more valuable of the two metals. And that's what happens. |
| 1:21.4 | You see gold being pulled from the market at the same time that the federal government is |
| 1:24.5 | trying to hold onto gold in order to convince the world, and especially the financial class in the country, we're staying on the gold standard. |
| 1:32.7 | The reason that this uncertainty lingers for so long, Cleveland is engaged in a lot of triage |
| 1:39.7 | throughout his administration, which eventually stanches the bleeding, but we never get to full recovery |
| 1:45.0 | until the McKinley administration afterwards, is because this tension runs through the middle |
| 1:50.4 | of the Democratic Party. |
| 1:51.7 | So the financial markets can never calm down because they never know whether the gold or |
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