The politician who intimidated TR: 3/8: A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland by Troy Senik
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 22 May 2023
⏱️ 14 minutes
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The politician who intimidated TR: 3/8: A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland by Troy Senik
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
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS I In The World. I'm John Batchett. I'm visiting with Troy Sennick, his new book, |
| 0:10.4 | A Man Of Iron. He's the story of Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th President of the United |
| 0:16.7 | States. You notice there's something in between. That's because Grover Cleveland was three |
| 0:22.2 | times a candidate for the presidency. He won the popular vote all three times, but the |
| 0:28.5 | second time he lost in the electoral college. Why did he lose? Why is a man who's been celebrated |
| 0:34.8 | his whole life as Troy writes, he's not for turning, which we say of Margaret Thatcher, we say |
| 0:40.2 | that of Grover Cleveland. Why was he rejected in the election of 1888? We go immediately to |
| 0:46.1 | the policies that dominate the conversation. We've mentioned the Grand Army, the Republic, |
| 0:51.1 | rebuking Grover Cleveland for not handing out the pensions that are brought by senators and |
| 0:57.3 | congressmen as a form of, well, the graft is too strong a word, favors. However, we come to his |
| 1:03.8 | thinking about America as the frontier is closing. And I want to start there because you mentioned |
| 1:10.0 | Troy that he denounces Duranamo as a murderous savage. I thought Duranamo in Grover Cleveland's |
| 1:15.8 | life, good heavens. What was Grover Cleveland's opinion for the least among us, the Native Americans |
| 1:21.8 | and the African Americans, and also for the people who were homesteading in America. Let's |
| 1:28.4 | begin with the Native Americans, the indigenous people. What was his attitude about their |
| 1:34.7 | challenges? He has what we would now regard as a fairly righteous attitude about the way |
| 1:42.1 | that Native Americans have been mistreated by the federal government. He singles them out |
| 1:46.2 | in his inaugural address and reproaches the country for the way that they've been treated in |
| 1:51.8 | the past. And he makes one of the objectives of his first term trying to set Native Americans |
| 1:58.2 | on better footing. The practical implications of this is he signs something known as the |
| 2:03.5 | DAWS Act. And the idea here is that Cleveland thinks as the frontier is closing that it is |
| 2:11.4 | unsustainable to continue this sort of one country to systems model where you've got the |
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