On Election Day night, following one of the most bizarre elections in recent memory, former president of the United States, Donald Trump, pulled off an improbable win to reclaim the highest office in the land. Following inauguration in January 2025, Trump will add the title of 47th President to his resume, right next to 45th President. For as unprecedented of a scenario this is, it is not the first time America has handed the role to a singular man twice.
Over a hundred years ago, in 1884, corruption was at the center of politics. Republican challenger James G. Blaine had found himself involved in a scandal known as the “Mulligan letters,” involving James Mulligan, a bookkeeper, possessing letters which showed Blaine selling his influence in Congress. Capitalizing on this, Grover Cleveland ran on the slogan of “a public office is a public trust.” However, while running a trusting face in an untrusting political world, Cleveland found himself in the middle of a scandal. A woman named Maria Halpin insinuated Cleveland had raped and impregnated her eleven years prior to the election. The woman would then find herself admitted into a mental asylum, with the child eventually being adopted by another family. The scandal led to chants of “ma, ma, where’s my Pa?” As the two scandal-ridden men face each other on election day, the race would be decided by the swing states of New York, New Jersey, Indiana, and Connecticut. All four would narrowly go to Cleveland, becoming the first post-Civil War democrat elected to the office. Democrats responded to the chants with “Gone to the White House. Ha! Ha! Ha!”
On March 4, 1885, Cleveland was inaugurated as the 22nd President of the United States, promising to adhere to “business principals.” His first term included the signings of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, designed to add regulations to the railroad industry, requiring all rates be “reasonable and just,” establishing the Interstate Commerce Commission, the first regulatory agency in America. In addition, he signed the Dawes Act of 1887. Through this act, the federal government divides up the tribal lands, aimed to assimilate Native Americans into the current United States society. Only the Native American who accepted the act were allowed to become US citizens. In the aftermath of this act, Native American social structures of tribes struggled, and many found it impossible to adjust to the new agricultural role. This act would result in the government taking 90 million acres belonging to Native Americans and selling it to non-native 1US citizens.
Along with these acts, Cleveland’s first term included the accepting of France’s gift to America, the Statue of Liberty, commemorating the alliance America and France formed during the Revolutionary War. He also would reject and veto hundreds of fraudulent pension bills that intended to send federal funds to Civil War veterans.
Before he would become the first President to serve nonconsecutive terms, he would first make history by being the first President to marry while in the White House, marrying the daughter of his former law partner, Frances Folsom, 27 years younger than the then-President.
In 1888, Cleveland found himself locked in another tight election, this time to former Senator Bejamin Harrison. The election would again come down to four swing states, however, this time Cleveland would come up short in two of them, giving Harrison the presidency. Despite the loss, Cleveland would win the popular vote, having happened for just the third time where the victor lost the popular vote. To this day, only five elections have had a different winner in the election and the popular vote. First Lady Frances Cleveland told a staff member they are “coming back four years from today.”
In 1892, after taking four years to work for a New York law firm, Grover Cleveland would once again return to the top of the ticket to represent the democratic party. Cleveland would go on to win the election of 1892 soundly following a divisive McKinley Tariff passed by Harrison. With a second victory, Cleveland would become 24th President of the United States, four years after becoming the 22nd.
Cleveland was welcomed back to an acute depression, which he would accredit to Harrison’s Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890. Cleveland would call for Congress to repeal the act. However, the depression only continued and everyday American began to feel as if Cleveland represented the interests of big businesses over their own. The Pullman Strike of 1894, a nationwide railroad strike where rail traffic throughout the Midwest was greatly interfered and disrupted through the summer, became the first strike where the government would use an injunction to break it. Throughout the ongoing dilemma Cleveland found himself in, he would help to create Labor Day as a national holiday as a gesture towards the movement. In response to the Chicago strikers violating an injunction, a judicial order that restrains actions of violence, Cleveland responded by sending troops into Chicago on July 3 to enforce it, sending what seemed to be much more than necessary to handle the situation. Cleveland’s blunt response to the now-violent strikers is widely seen as the most important piece of Cleveland’s history.
In addition, he would go on to force Great Britain to accept the arbitration of the dispute with Venezuela over the boundary between the colony of British Guiana and Venezuela.
Due to the depression Cleveland inherited upon his second term, Cleveland left office fairly unpopular and was not nominated for a third term by the democratic party. Historians widely rank Cleveland as an average president.
As Donald Trump makes his preparations to return to the White House for a second term, recall Mark Twain’s saying of “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Only the future will tell what our history will be with our second nonconsecutive president.