Welcome to another message on the presidents of the United States and how they affected the world and the people here, even until this day. I want to read Romans, the 13th chapter, a couple of verses from that. Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no other authority except from God. And those which are established are established by God. Therefore, he who resists authority has oppressed the ordinance of God, and they who oppose will receive condemnation upon themselves. Rulers are not a cause for fear of good behavior, but for evil. And do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same. And it goes on down to verse number 7. We won't read any more of that, What it's saying here is that God set up government. In the days of Noah, God established government. Government is supposed to protect the good people from the bad people and the people from the government. Now, when governments don't do that, something is drastically wrong. God, even in the days of Noah, established the death penalty for capital crimes. And here we have a president, Grover Cleveland, that actually hung two or three men himself. He was an executioner when he was sheriff. He's the only president that ever directly executed anybody. Of course, if you want to throw George Bush in and you want to throw Abraham Lincoln and some of these men that killed hundreds of thousands of people, in war because of what they did. But this man actually executed, these men were criminals and he executed the criminals. He took his, whatever he did, he took his office very seriously. He didn't want to kill people, by the way, but he thought it was his duty to do that. Stephen Grover Cleveland was born March the 18th, 1837. and he died June 24, 1908 when he was 71 years old. He was an American lawyer, a preacher's son, a PK, a preacher's kid, and he was the 22nd and 24th President of the United States. He won the election by popular vote for three elections. Three. Not two, but three. He should have served the second term. There was voter fraud in the second one and he won the popular vote anyway, but he was awarded to Benjamin Harrison the presidency even though he had won it. But he took it back. Benjamin Harrison was president for four years and he took it back. Because the people loved him. Because he did a good job. He was an honest man. His honesty was what made him stand out from all the rest of the politicians of his day. Look at some of the scoundrels that were there. James Arthur These people tried to reform the politics of this nation after the Civil War. Lincoln said a bad president. There was so much corruption from there on. And it took several presidents to clean it up. And this is one man that cleaned house. He got some real good soap and got with it. In 1881, he was elected mayor of Buffalo, New York and later governor of New York. He was a leader of the pro-business, what you might call, southern conservative Democrats, who opposed high taxes and they believed in small government. Now, the Democratic Party today does not do that at all. Like I said, back in the 1800s, the Democrats were the Republicans and the Republicans were the Democrats, and here we have a conservative. one of the first conservatives now after the Civil War. He was a leader of what they call the pro-business Bourbon Democrats who opposed high taxes. He believed in a gold standard to stop inflation. He wanted to hold inflation down. The only problem was that the Jewish people held control of all of the gold. And they would do that all the way up until Franklin Roosevelt's time. And Franklin Roosevelt changed over to the silver standard because they didn't control. He told the Jews of New York, he said, if you don't go along with me, I'll strike new money. We'll have new money. Because he wanted to get the control out of their hands and the banking, etc. There we went off on a little bit. He opposed inflation and he imposed imperialism. He opposed subsidies to businesses and farmers and or even veterans. He believed government should be small and do what government should do immediately. He had a crusade for political reform and physical conservatism. And it made him an absolute icon or standard for all American conservatives of his era, of the whole era. He won praise from the common man. He was a common middle class man that made some real good decisions. His praise for honesty, self-reliance, and integrity and commitment to principles thereof. He fought political corruption, patronage, and bossism. He was a reformer. Now there was a like-minded wing of the Republican Party called the Mugwops. They were not, they didn't want to line up with what would be called the Radical Republicans. The radical Republicans had just absolutely made a mess of the South. Abraham Lincoln, in his inaugural address, declared war on the South. He said, you don't pay your taxes, you don't stay in the Union, I will invade the South. And he did. The Union had never been a, what we call, it was only a voluntary situation. And the states began to secede from the Union. And he said, you can't do that. Of course, the Constitution didn't read that. But he rewrote the Constitution. He reinterpreted the Constitution. That's why we have today, isn't it? We have problems with this today. The Constitution was fine, but they reinterpreted the Constitution. The Mugwumps voted the Republican Party and went into the conservative Democrats and they voted for Grover Cleveland. His first administration and then he lost the White House even though he won the popular vote and by corruption Harrison won it. He made a mess out of things and the people wanted Grover Cleveland back. He was a what we might call a formidable policy maker. And when he became president, he did more vetoes because the Republican, the radical Republicans were trying to pay everybody for everything and get their brother-in-laws and sister-in-laws and uncles and everything on the dole. He fought that. Now, it's the opposite, isn't it? The Democrats are doing that today. He interceded in the railroad strike of 1894 to keep the railroads moving. And it angered the labor unions, but he says, America comes first. The solidity of America comes first before anything else. He became a little unpopular for that among the working man. His reputation for his good character survived all the troubles even of his second administration. He was the 22nd and the 24th president of the United States. The only president that had gone back to office after he was voted out of office, but we know that he wasn't voted out of office. One writer said of Grover Cleveland, his greatness lies in typical rather than unusual qualities. He had no endowments that thousands of men do not have. He was possessed with honesty, courage, firmness, independence, and common sense. He possessed those things in a degree other than that men do not normally have. By the end of his second term, because he wouldn't help the farmers out, because he wouldn't go on a silver standard or basically inflate the economy with silver money. Of course, silver money is precious metals. We don't have that today. We don't have any precious metals backing anything up. It's just a promise and a lick. That's all. He was a successful leader. Even to this day he is praised for his honesty and integrity and adherence to his morals. Defying party boundaries. He defied party boundaries. He would not fire any man because he was a Republican when he became president. And he was the first president besides Andrew Johnson. And Andrew Johnson was kind of ushered in because Abraham Lincoln was killed. But Andrew Johnson was fought by a total Republican House and Senate and he had no chance to do anything. And he'd been handed down as a bad president. They wouldn't let him be president. They called him a dictator. But in all reality, Abraham Lincoln was the worst dictator America ever had. The most powerful, the most stringent, the most tyrannical. tyrant dictator that America had. They called him the gentle dictator, the benevolent tyrant. But he totally destroyed America. He tore it apart. 600,000 to 750,000 men died because of his decisions. And slavery was not the reason for the Civil War. That was a war measure, as Lincoln himself The first child that he had was by a lady by the name of Maria Harpin. They said she was a very pretty girl. And she got pregnant. She talked to a Presbyterian minister. The minister went to Grover Cleveland and told him, you know, she says she's pregnant with your child. He said, well, she runs around with all kinds of men and she's a drunk. But he says, I will take care of that child. Now, he did. The child's name was Oscar Folsom Cleveland. He later changed his name to King. He was raised by one of Cleveland's close friends, a very well-to-do man in a well-to-do family. away from her mother, put her in an insane asylum, and they decided that she wasn't really insane. So they turned her loose. She tried to get her son back, but she never did. Going back again, Stephen Grover Cleveland, he didn't use the name Stephen, they called him General Steve, but he didn't use the name Steve. He was born in Caldwell, New Jersey to Anne or Annie Neal, and Richard Fowley Cleveland, which was a Presbyterian minister. Call him also a Congregational Presbyterian minister. A Congregational Presbyterian minister is the one that the congregation actually, it's like Baptist church. The church makes up its mind what they're going to do. It's not run by a board or some bishop or whatever. He was originally from Connecticut. His mother was from Baltimore and was the daughter of a bookseller. On his father's side, Cleveland was descended from English ancestors. He was 5'11", weighed about 250 pounds. He got sick while he was in the White House and lost down to about 200 pounds. He was always a little overweight in his whole life. The first of his family immigrated to Massachusetts from Cleveland, England in 1635. His father's maternal grandfather, Richard Fowley Jr., fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill and was the son of an immigrant from Guernsey and on Bunker Hill and was sort of a, which was really a bad, terrible battle. One of the worst battles. Cleveland was descended from Anglo-Irish Protestants and German Quakers from Philadelphia. He was related to General Moses Cleveland, after whom the city of Cleveland, Ohio was named, and he was the sixth cousin of Ulysses S. Grant. He was the fifth of nine children in his home. They named him Stephen Grover in honor of the first pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Caldwell, where his father was pastor at that time. He became known as Grover all of his adult life. They moved to Fayetteville, New York, where Grover spent quite a bit of his childhood. His neighbors described him as full of fun and inclined to play pranks on people, even in the family. And he was fond of sports. His father was a missionary, and missionary work is hard work. I can tell you that right now. Missionary work is hard work. He moved there in 1850 to Clinton, New York. to work as a district secretary for the American Home Mission Society. His income was insufficient for such a large family. And the financial conditions forced him to remove Grover from school. He couldn't go to school. He couldn't afford to send him to school. And place him in a two-year mercantile apprenticeship at Fayetteville. And you know what that meant? A two-year mercantile apprenticeship, it means that he was sold as a worker or as a slave for two years, only two years. Andrew Johnson wanted, after the Civil War, he said, let's let the black people, we got to do something with them, let's go let them be, sit one year at a time in servitude. And the Radical Republicans had a wall of eclipses. What did they do? They gave them Indian land and Indian money. They had problems, what to do with them. His living conditions were not very good. After his slavery or servitude ended, after two years, he went back so he could be married to family. The mission work took the toll of Cleveland's father. He took an assignment in Holland Patton, New York, near Utica, New York today, and moved his family again. But shortly after he moved there, he died from gastric ulcer. Grover was said to have learned of his father's death from a boy selling newspapers. He had received his elementary education in Fayetteville Academy and the Clinton Liberal Academy. He again had to leave school after his father died to help support his family. This man was struggling. He was a struggling middle class person. Middle class person because they weren't into slaves and into factories. Later, William, Cleveland's brother, was hired as a teacher in the New York Institute for the Blind in New York City. And then William obtained a place for Cleveland as an assistant teacher there. He went back home to the Holland patent at the end of 1854, and an elder in the church wanted him to follow in his father's footsteps, and he wanted him to be a preacher, a minister. And the elder promised him that he'd pay his way to college if he would become a minister, and he declined. Finally, in 1855, he decided to move a little more west. He stopped in Buffalo, where his uncle Louis F. Allen gave him a clerical job. He was an important man in Buffalo, and he introduced his nephew to some very influential men, including partners in the law firm Rogers, Bowen, and Rogers. Millard Fillmore, the 13th President of the United States, had previously worked for that partnership. He later took a clerkship for the firm and began to read law. And when you mean read law, you're reading the law books, but you're studying for your bar exam. And he was admitted to the New York Bar in 1859 as a lawyer. He worked with the Rogers firm for three years before leaving in 1862 to start his own practice. Now 1862, guess what? We're in the Civil War. In January 1863 he was appointed Assistant District Attorney in Erie County. The American Civil War was raging and he was called upon to be conscripted or drafted into the army. And he chose to hire a man by the name of George Benenski, a Polish immigrant, to take his place. And he paid him $150. Equivalent to this day, probably somewhere around $5,000 or more. By the way, the 32-year-old Polish boy made it through the war alive. Cleveland was obsessive-compulsive in what we might call his attention. He single-mindedly concentrated on every case that he had. His mind was on that case and that case alone until he got that case taken care of. He was a hard worker. Now I didn't say he was out digging ditches, but he was working hard in his law office reading, finding out how he could win his cases for the betterment of his clients. In 1868, Grover attracted some professional attention for his winning defense of a libel suit against the editor of the Buffaloes. commercial advertiser. He assumed a lifestyle of simplicity and instead of buying a house, he lived in a boarding house. He devoted his income for the support of his mother and younger sisters. He enjoyed a pretty active social life in hotel lobbies and saloons of the time. He shunned the circles of the super elite. He wasn't part of that. He never looked at part of the ruling class of America, so to speak. And the ruling class had started ruling since the Civil War. And they kept everybody under their throne. He became the sheriff of Erie County, of Erie County. He did not like Abraham Lincoln and he did not like John C. Fremont. They were not his picks of character. Even though many of his people that he rubbed elbows in in the law industry, he did not agree with them always. He kept quiet about a lot of things and kept a lot of things to himself and just plodded forward. In 1870, with the help of a friend, Oscar Folsom, Cleveland secured the Democratic nomination for Sheriff of Erie County. Now he named his son by Maria Halpin, Oscar Folsom Cleveland. He won the election in January 1st, 1871 at age 33. It is said that he earned fees that would yield up to $40,000 at that time. That's a lot of money over this two-year term. His service as a sheriff was unremarkable, but he took his duties very seriously. The sheriff's office would pay an executioner $10 for carrying out an execution. And Grover Cleveland believed that if the death penalty had been given and decided upon by the judge and jury that it ought to be carried out as soon as possible. He ended up in September 6, 1872 when Patrick Maurice was executed. He had become convicted of murdering his own mother. And he personally carried out the execution. In spite of his reservations for death and dying and assuming this, he took his job seriously. He hanged another murderer by the name of John Gaffney on February 14, 1873. After his term as sheriff ended, he went back to his law firm. Now, you have to realize that some people went from sheriff to governor and then, or mayor, and then to governor. Sheriff was a foot into the political ring. It is said by his law partners that no man looked at him more than a limited simple, sturdy attorney. And they didn't realize that later on, just a few years later, that he was standing in Washington, D.C. taking the oath as President of the United States. His reputation catapulted him there. Now, he had this one problem with this Maria Halpin and this child, which he took care When he began to run for office, his political supporters said, what are we going to do about Maria Halpin and the baby? He says, whatever you do, tell the truth. Just tell the truth. I made a mistake. Yeah, this is my child. OK? I'm taking care of him. Simple as that. Now that boy, Oscar Folsom Cleveland, would later change his name to King, and he would become a very successful optetrician in New York, and live a long and full life. In the 1870s, the municipal government of New Buffalo had grown increasingly corrupt. And when they had corruption, they'd always come to one man, Robert Cleveland, and say, what should we do about this? The Republican political machines were just raking in the spoils of the system. In 1881, the Republicans nominated a slate of political, disruptible machine politicians. Democrats saw the opportunity to gain the votes of the disaffected Republicans by nominating a more honest candidate, and there's where we have the mugwumps. We have the Republicans going over to the Democratic side. They were the conservative Republicans. They approached Cleveland, and he agreed to run for mayor of Buffalo, New York. They would, on the same ticket, run those that he could approve of. When the more notorious politicians were left off the Democratic ticket, Grover Cleveland accepted the nomination. He said, I don't want to be in there among all of these. I don't want to be among a corrupt Republican. I don't want to be among corrupt Democrats. I want a clean house. I don't want any favors that I have to pay." His term as mayor, he spent fighting entrenched interests of the party machine, the Democrats and the Republicans, especially the Republicans. His first act was the veto of the street cleaning contract. They were going to hire the highest bidder at $442,000. rather than the lowest bidder at $100,000. He vetoed it. And you know what? The common man was really happy about this. He would speak and just say, hey, this guy's corrupt. You want me to give him this bid for $422,000 when I can hire somebody else that does the same job for $100,000 and it's less taxes? That don't sound like a Democrat today, does it? bipartisan graft by both the Democrats and the Republicans. Mayor Grover Cleveland wouldn't have anything to do with it. He wasn't going to squander all the people's hard-paid taxes, and he didn't believe people ought to be paid taxes any more than what was necessary to run the government, and he wasn't going to squander the money when they got it. The Democratic Party officials in New York began to think about Cleveland as a possible nominee for government. Now he went from sheriff to mayor. Now he's going to be governor. Oh, there weren't very many good people to pick from back then. It's kind of like today. Very few good politicians out there. There's a hundred bad ones to one good one. The Republican and the Democratic Party were split in 1882 and several men had been contending for the nomination. Cleveland was in the third place in the first ballot. But they kept going through these guys and kept going through these guys and kept going through these guys and all of them were corrupt. They were all corrupt. It's really easy to find that honest man because you just trail him back. Even when he had an affair with this woman and it got her pregnant, he took care of the kid and he wouldn't say that, not my kid. He won the election as governor of New York at the highest margin that had been ever known at that time. people got to vote. They voted for him. The people voted for him. He brought to his position the idea of no needless spending. The first time he attracted attention was that his veto of the bill to reduce the fares of the New York City elevator trains to five cents. The people say, yay, five cents. Jay Gould was unpopular. He was the owner. And his fare increases were widely denounced by everyone. But Grover Cleveland saw the bill as unjust because Gould had taken over the railroads when they were failing. And they were working and they were running. He said, if we're going to leave this thing solvent, we have to not reduce the fare at this time. Later on, they realized that Grover Cleveland was right. The newspapers began to praise Cleveland and his veto vote. The future president, Teddy Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt cleaned up New York too, remember, then a member of the assembly and reluctantly voted for the bill which Cleveland objected. He didn't want to vote for it, but he was praised Cleveland because he did. And here we have a Republican praising a conservative Democrat. His defiance of political corruption won great public acclaim. And the Tammany Hall organization of New York City hated him, and they would continue to hate him. The boss was John Kelly, and he had disapproved of Cleveland's nomination as governor, but it didn't do any good. Cleveland always steadfastly opposed the nominees of the Tammanyites, of Tammany Hall. And he supported Teddy Roosevelt, and Teddy Roosevelt supported him. He was finally nominated for president by the Republicans, or by the Democrats. And the Republicans convened in Chicago and they nominated the former Speaker of the House, James Lee Blaine of Maine. And it used to be Blaine Blaine, James Lee Blaine, the Continental Wire from the state of Maine. That's what they called him. Now he did some good things in history, really. He helped James Garfield and others. But he was a crooked man. Blaine's nomination alienated many of the Republicans because they knew they didn't like him. And even though they're Republicans, they couldn't vote for him. That's different than today. I'm going to jump ahead just 100 years plus to Joe Biden. Joe Biden was a kind of a corrupt political, a very corrupt political man, as we know from history. And he was a, what we might call a sexual predator and a pedophile under several things, different accusations, but nobody, he was so powerful that nobody did anything. He had sexually assaulted one woman and she testified against him. But they asked her and her friend that stood beside her, because she saw it happen, and they were asked, are you going to vote for Biden? And she said, well, he's a Democrat. She voted for Biden, even though she had been molested by him, because he was a Democrat. At this period of time, These conservative Republicans weren't like that. They didn't want the corruption in there with James D. Blaine. Blaine, Blaine, Blaine, James D. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of Maine. They couldn't stomach that. They didn't want him for president. Now he ran for president several times. He alienated the mugwumps, were those that Were they dissatisfied of Republicans because of what they call the radical Republicans, which would be radical Democrats today? The Conkling faction was disenfranchised by President Chester Arbor. And the Democratic Party believers believed that the Republicans' choice gave them an opportunity to win the White House for the first time since the Civil War. 1856. If they could run the right candidate. Samuel Tilden was an initial front runner, and he had won an election, but he didn't get it either. The Electoral College elected the other man even though Tilden won the election. And we will see that again in Grover Cleveland's second run for president. He won the electoral vote and won it, but by, in the dark back rooms, there was what we call voter fraud, and they gave it to Harrison instead. Tilden did not want to take it because his health was poor. Anyway, in the end, They voted to have Grover Cleveland run for Democratic Party. The Republicans got on to the idea that this so-called really respected man and everything had had an affair with this woman, Maria Halpin. And they did a cartoon of him and it said, Papa, Papa, Mama, where is my papa? Where is my father? And they tried to play it down and they asked him, what do you want to say about this? He said, just tell the truth. That happened. Just tell the truth. Let's go on. From there. Tammany Hall completely, the Democratic Party completely was against him. They tried every way in the world. to discredit Grover Cleveland. Blaine, James B. Blaine, over a span of years had been involved in several questionable deals. And Grover Cleveland said, a public office is a place of public trust. You must be, you must have the future of your constituents in mind always, no matter what. He finally won it. There was a deal about James C. Blaine though, they had a letter of Blaine's correspondence in one of his earlier denials of political corruption. He met with this blackmailer in an office. And he said, I want to see, he brought money with him, he said, I want to see the letters and make sure that these are the letters that I sold. And in one of the letters he said, burn the letter after you read it. He grabbed all the letters and took off running. But people found out about it. It said, Ma, Ma, where's my Pa? What are we going to do about this, Grover? And he says, above all, tell the truth. They looked upon him, except for this problem with Alvin, as a life of pure honesty. They used her to try to discredit him. And she said, until I met Grover Cleveland, my life was pure and spotless, which wasn't true. The Tammany Democrats, and a lot of them were Irish, they didn't like some of the things that the Republican Party had said. The pope-ish, rum-running, Catholics. And that really decided the election right there. Blaine's mother was Irish Catholic, but what his supporters said broke. Rum running, rum, Romanism, and rebellion. That's what the Democratic Party was. And these people voted for Grover Cleaver. His electoral college was 219-182. After he was elected, they were saying, ma, ma, where's my pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha. He was faced with the task of filling government jobs. Usually when the Republicans took over, they fired all the Democrats. They put all Republicans in there. That was what they called the spoiled system. That's what they called the wages of war. When you won the war, you could do whatever you wanted to. Instead, Grover Cleveland said, if there's a Republican doing his job and is qualified to do the job, he's going to stay doing that job. And then the Democrats didn't like that. Because he wasn't going to go disfill every Not only did he do that, but he began to reduce all the federal jobs. Because he said, these people sitting back here are doing nothing. The people in America are paying taxes for people to do nothing. He said, I won't have it. I won't have anything to do with it. He reformed other parts of the government. The railroad, what we might call the upper crust top feeders and the bottom feeders. what we call corporate welfare. He began to slice all of the draft. He signed an act in 1877, or 1887 that is, the Interstate Commerce Commission. And he and the Secretary of the Navy, William C. Whitney, undertook to modernize the Navy and cancel construction contracts that resulted in a much inferior ship. He said, let's don't build these rust buckets. Let's build ships. America may have to go to war. And we have to have a Navy. We have to have a good Navy. He took 81 million acres from the railroads. He took 81 million acres that the Republicans had given to the railroad and confiscated it. That's what caused the Civil War to begin with. And that's what caused all the rebellion after the Civil War was the railroads taking people's property. Well, he took it back. Their lands were forfeited. Cleveland was the first Democratic president subject to the Tenure of Office Act, which originated in 1867. The act purported to require a Senate to approve the dismissal of any presidential appointee, and that's when they were fighting with Abraham Lincoln's successor. They tried to impeach him. Cleveland objected to the act in principle and his steadfast refusal to abide by it prompted its full fall into disfavor with the political parties and the United States, the people of the United States. He faced the Republican Senate and often used his veto to deal with it. Remember, the corrupt Republican Party was in power, feeding their families and their friends and associates. He billed hundreds of private pension bills for Civil War veterans. Now today, that would not be looked upon as good. When people fought in a war and they were injured in a war for the nation they were fighting with or for, they ought to be taken care of. He didn't believe that. He believed in a small government. The government didn't pressure him after he overrode that. When Congress was pressured by the Grand Army of the Republic, passed a bill granting pensions for disabilities not called by military service, Leland also vetoed that. He vetoed more bills than any other president up until his time. Congress had appropriated $100,000 to purchase seed and grain for farmers that had been hit by the drought and bad weather. And he vetoed that. He said the government has no business supporting people. The people support government to protect them. not to support them. This isn't a Democrat of today, is it? He said directly, I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution. He was a constitutional president. And I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of an individual's suffering, which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency is to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadfastly resisted to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that though the people support the government, the government should not support the people. Remember what government's supposed to do? It's supposed to protect the good from the bad. and supposed to inflict the death penalty on long-doers and protect people from the government. And he was bound and determined to protect people from the government. The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve the fellow citizens in misfortune. He believed that neighbors ought to take care of neighbors. If you got a neighbor over here and suffering, then you should help them. They're part of your community, and that is your job to do that, as the Bible teaches. Of course, today we have welfare, we have disabilities, and all of this, and I agree with most of that. But the welfare that we have here, and we're bringing illegal aliens, which are outlaws into our country, and then putting them on welfare, and supporting them being illegal, there's something wrong with that. And without even being citizens of the state, giving them the right to vote, which is nonsense. He said, this has been repeatedly and quite lately demonstrated. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character and of the individuals of that nation. While it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment, and conduct which strengthens the bonds of common brotherhood between men." In Fish Lake Valley, every person, every neighbor was looked upon as something very precious, and you took care of them, you helped them. We have people coming over here checking on us all the time, don't we? All the time checking on us. They have dinners and things, and they take care of each other. The Dorcas Women's Club, they help the children. We have fundraisers. We have fundraisers people give for the development of the children and field trips and things to school. Don't ask the government to do it, we do it. It's old-fashioned around here. One of the most horrible, volatile, currency issues back then was, you know, America was demanded, foreign nations demanded us to pay our debts in gold. And we were losing gold. And every dollar was backed by a gold dollar. Every paper dollar was backed by a gold dollar. Now silver is much less expensive or valuable than gold. And so they had started printing or coining silver. dimes and quarters, half dollars and silver dollars. And they were doing this indiscriminately. And it was inflating the economy with silver instead of gold. And he fought it hard. He fought it hard. Later on we realized now we don't have silver and we don't have gold. We had a gold standard and then we had a silver standard and we have no standard now. They can do to us whatever they wish. The taxpayers paid their government bills in silver, while the international creditors demanded payment in gold, resulting in the depletion of the nation's gold supply. Grover Cleveland stood for a gold standard. He believed if they went to the silver standard, or coined a lot of silver money, they would inflate, and we'd have inflation. He believed that the tariffs that caused the Civil War ought to be reduced. I mean, greatly reduced. That's what caused the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln, in his inaugural address, he said, if the South tries to secede the Union or cease to pay its taxes and tariffs, I will invade them. And I will bring war to them. And the South said, we will pay you for every military base, everything else, just leave us alone. We believe in free trade. The so-called protected tariff. Cleveland's third annual address to Congress, he said this. When we consider the theory of our institutions and guarantees to every citizen, the full enjoyment of the fruits of his industry and enterprise, with only such deduction as may be his share toward the careful and economical maintenance of his government." The very careful economical maintenance of his government which protects him. It is plain that the exactation of more than this is indefensible, extortion, and culpable betrayal of American fairness and justice. The public treasurer, which should only exist as a conduit conveying the people's tribute to its legitimate objects of expenditure, becomes a hoarding place for money needlessly withdrawn from trade and people's use. thus crippling our national energies, suspending our country's development, preventing investment in a productive enterprise, and threatening financial disturbance and inviting schemes of public plunder. Slavery was a war measure, as Abraham Lincoln said. He had to have an excuse for killing 700,000 people. Cleveland was a non-interventionist. He did not want to promote any administration that would go out into other parts of the world and try to intervene. He said, just stay away. this isolationist idea. Now, in all reality, I think that he was wrong in that. We know that today. He stood off Puerto Rico and Hawaii as Hawaii wanted to become a state. He sent people there to investigate that and they came back and said the people don't want to become a state, even though the politicians said they did. So he voted it down. which we know now that it should have been a state and it finally became a state, didn't it? Cleveland's military policy from 1885 to 1889 was founded on the emphasis of self-defense and modernization. He recommended a massive $127 million construction program, 29 harbors and river estatuaries to include new breech-clothing, rifled guns, that's cannons, and mortars and naval minefields. They were called the Endicott Board and Endicott Program. They were implemented until still in inflammation until about 1910. 27 locations were defended by over 70 forts. Many of the weapons had remained in use until they were replaced with more modern weapons. America was going to enter into the Spanish-American War in 1898, remember. If it wasn't for Grover Cleveland, we wouldn't have been ready. And again, another great president, Teddy Roosevelt, built that Navy even greater. He called it the Great White Fleet. Now we come down to civil rights and immigration. Civil rights and immigration. There was a problem. Grover Cleveland condemned outrages against the Chinese workers, and of course there was still slavery in farms and ranches with American Indians as slaves during all this time. And even the factories were still enslaving the workers. They sold their souls to the company store. Little children five years old and up would be working in these very dangerous factories. But there were much much outraged against Chinese immigrants. He said that he believed that they ought to limit the Chinese immigration altogether because the Chinese would not be willing to assimilate into white society or American society. They were not going to lay their traditions down and become part of this. He said the Irish did this, the Italians did this. He said these people won't. So we should not allow them to come in. That ought to give us a little bit of a lesson today, shouldn't it? Not willing to assimilate Islam. And even the illegal aliens that come up here fly the Mexican flag in America. Doing obeisance to that, but not to the American flag. He said that if Chinese immigrants went back to China, they shouldn't be able to return to America. Let them stay there. We don't want any more of this problem. He believed that the Native American people, the Indians of America, were wards of the state, but he said they ought to be assimilated in and their land ought to be divided up so they cannot have reservations and things. And this is what we call the Dawes Act, which my grandfather fought hard against. Samuel Paul. He said, this guardianship over these people involves in our part efforts for the improvement of their condition and enforcement of their rights. He encouraged the idea of cultural assimilation and pushing for the passage of the Dawes Act, which was one of the greatest mistakes there was. The Dawes Act totally opened up Indian lands for white graft. or anybody graft, Italian, Irish, whatever. They came in and they killed Indians by the thousands. You can read many books of what happened. What happened to the Osage people when they discovered oil on the lands, etc. It's said here that he believed that the individual tribes should be disbanded and that the lands ought to be distributed among the Indian people. But also, the biggest problem with this was, is that when they did that, the Indians were considered not able to financially or intellectually take care of their own money. So they appointed over them lawyers, white lawyers that took land, took 50% of everything they had or more, and many times killed them because they made themselves the conservators and the estate would go to them. Many Indian lives were lost. He did send the settlers out of the, in 1885, President Arthur had opened up Dakota Territory to white settlement by an executive order. Tens of thousands of settlers gathered at the border of these lands as what they called the land rushes to take possession of the land that wasn't theirs. Cleveland believed that Arthur's order was in violation of all the treaties with the tribes and rescinded the act on April the 17th of that year, ordering the settlers out of that territory. Again, he was trying to be honest, but he did not see all the loopholes. He sent 18 companies of army troops to enforce the treaties. My throat isn't what it was. And I'll see if I can talk again, I hope. Cleveland sent 18 companies of Army troops to enforce the treaties and ordered Philip Sheridan, at the time Commanding General of the United States Army, to investigate the matter. Cleveland was 47 years old when he entered into the White House. His sister, Rose Cleveland, joined him in acting as a hostess. Like James Buchanan had. James Buchanan and Grover Cleveland were bachelors. Except Grover Cleveland didn't want to remain as a bachelor. In 1885, the daughter of Cleveland's friend, Oscar Folsom, whom he named this child after, Oscar Folsom Cleveland, remember, his son, visited him in Washington. This girl was young. She was pretty young, but you have to remember it now. Smith Paul, my great-great-great-grandfather, married a girl 16 years old, and he was in his 60s. But he took good care of her, and they had six kids. Now he was, she was his ward, this girl was, his business partner. Oscar Folsom died, and he took care of her as his ward. She was a student at Wells College. When she returned to school, President Cleveland received her mother's permission to correspond with her, honorably, even though she was much half his age. But this was normal back then. On June 2, 1886, in the Blue Room at the White House, Cleveland was 49 years old at the time, and Francis Folsom was 21. He was basically 27 years older than she was. He was the second president to be wed while he was in office, but he was the only president that was ever wed in the White House, in the Blue Room. They say that there's a piece of that wedding cake still in existence today that they have kept to memorialize this. This young girl, this young lady, would win the hearts of the American people. Cleveland was the executor of her father's estate at her father's death. She was the youngest First Lady in history, but she was well beloved. They had five children. Ruth, they called her baby Ruth, they named the baby baby Ruth, the Babe Ruth candy bar after her. There was a conflict of this one because of the baseball player Babe Ruth. But they named the candy bar after this Baby Ruth. Esther in 1893, by the way, Baby Ruth lived from 1891 to 1904, not a long life. Esther lived from 1893 to 1980. Marianne lived from 1895 to 1977. Richard lived from 1897 to 1974. And Francis lived from 1903 to 1995. He also claimed paternity of Oscar Folsom Cleveland. Now, Oscar would later change his name to King. And he would become, as I said before, a renowned obstetrician in New York. And was a great asset to the women of that area because he took good care of women and delivered many babies. He nominated several men to the Supreme Court. And then in 1888, he had to return to private life for a while, but what he wanted to do was just be with his children. So he did. He had a law office and everything, but he just sat back and was with his children. The Republicans have campaigned heavily on the tariff issue, turning out a lot of protectionist voters in the industrial states of the North. That's what caused the Civil War, remember. And it weakened Cleveland's support in that swing state. A letter from the British ambassador supporting Cleveland caused a scandal that caused Cleveland to vote in New York. A British ambassador wrote a letter to support Cleveland and the Irish got mad because they hated the English. And so they wouldn't vote for him. The Irish really, there was a lot of political contention in America over Irish, the Irish immigrants. He lost the election, but he won the election. Grover Cleveland won the popular vote of the election, but in backrooms and voter corruption, they gave it to Benjamin Harrison. As Frances Cleveland left the White House, she told a staff member, now Jerry, I want you to take good care of all that furniture and ornaments in this house. or I want to find everything just as it is now when we come back again." And he asked her, when are you going to return? She said, we'll come back in four years. And that's basically what happened. Grover Cleveland won three consecutive elections, but he was cheated out of the second one. But the people were so disgusted with Benjamin Harrison, that it was easy for him to win the election again after four more years. In his second election, there was an economic panic. There was a Great Depression. And he didn't believe in public subsidies or anything like that like Teddy Roosevelt later enforced and also Franklin Roosevelt. There was an acute shortage of gold that increased the coinage of silver, and it greatly inflated, and people's savings went away. He reversed Benjamin Harrison's administration on the silver policy, but he believed Grover Cleveland believed that if you left the economy alone, even though it's falling around, and kept a solid foundation to it, the gold standard, that it would finally work itself out in the end. And still he began to fight the great trust of America. And we know, remember the Anti-Sherman, Anti-Trust Act? This is before that. Teddy Roosevelt would put that in. Cleveland sought to reverse the effects of the McKinley Tariff. The Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act was introduced by West Virginia's Representative William L. Wilson in December of 1893. After much debate, the bill was passed by the House by Consideral Morrison. The bill proposed a moderate downward revision in the tariff, especially in raw materials. The shortfall in revenue was to be made up by income tax of 2% on income above $4,000, which was the rich people. $4,000 then would be like $115,000 today or so, or $150,000. There was a great problem here. The bill passed the Senate with more than 600 amendments. 600 amendments? That nullified most of the reform. People still wanted to keep their crooked little fingers in the pot. The Sugar Trust, in particular, nullified most of the reform. They lobbied for changes that favored at the expense of the consumer. Cleveland was outraged with the final bill and denounced it as a disgraceful product of the control of Senate by trust and business interests. That's what we call lobbyists today. I believe it ought to be totally illegal to be a lobbyist. This is corruption. Even though he believed it was an improvement over the McKinley tariff and he allowed it to become law without his signature, he would not sign the bill. He campaigned for voting rights. even though he had no way to, citizens being given the right to vote. We're not talking about illegal aliens or anything else, but citizens ought to have the right to vote. And you have to realize that a lot of times people didn't have the right to vote if they didn't have property. They had to have property to have a right to vote. He wanted the federal government to oversee the election process from registration to the certification of returns because he had been cheated out of his second administration because of political corruption. We're still fighting over that today. The panic of 1893 damaged labor conditions that just threw this country in a total absolute mess. The government, or the great business, was lowering the wages of all the workers. And they were working 12-hour days. And the Pullman strike had significantly greater impact Then Coxsey's Army, there was a people called Coxsey's Army. Coxsey's Army rode up as a way to complain about bad wages, bad working conditions, and it was basically overrun. The Pullman strike had a greater impact than Coxy's army. The strike began against the Pullman Company over low wages and 12-hour workdays and sympathy strikes, led by American Railway Union. Eugene Debs soon followed. By 1894, 125,000 railroad workers were on strike, paralyzing the nation's commerce. This is terrible, because we're already in a depression and now commerce is paralyzed. Because the railroads carried the mail, and because several of the affected lines were in federal receiverships, Cleveland believed that federal solution was appropriate, and he obtained an injunction in federal court, and when the strikers refused to obey it, he sent federal troops into Chicago and 20 other rail centers. If it takes an entire army and the Navy of the United States government to deliver a postcard to Chicago, He proclaimed that card will be delivered. He believed that the nation, commerce, ought to be protected. We know that Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt later greatly improved the protection of this. Francis Stetson said, one of his advisors, are on the eve of a very dark night. Unless the return of commercial prosperity relieves popular discontent with what we believe is a democratic incompetence to make laws, and consequently the discontent with democratic administrations everywhere and every way, we're going to lose our focus. The Republicans won the biggest landslide after that when they put Benjamin Harrison in the White House. But what you don't know, what it doesn't say in any of these papers, is that the big industries, the steel industry, the railroad industry, told their workers, if that Democrat wins the election of the President of the United States, I'm going to fire you tomorrow. And they saw them voting. Democrat over here, Republican over here. Guess how many of those voters in those factories were willing to lose their job? They had to vote. They were forced to vote Republican. That it doesn't say in many books. But that's exactly how the Republicans bought the election of 1896. Big threats. He would not annex Hawaii and later on, though he did, he had an amendment that gave the United States a coaling naval station in Pearl Harbor because the ships were fired by coal. His military policy from 1893 to 1897. was committed to military modernization. He also adopted the Craig-Georgeson rifle, the 30-40 Craig, later would become something like a 30-06. He would have the first bolt-action repeating rifle. He would build torpedo bolts. And he would build iron-clad battleships. He, in his administration, this is really important to people today for some reason, he had a cancerous tumor in his soft palate, or his hard palate, in the roof of his mouth. He thought that if the American people knew that he was sick and all this, that it would be even a more financial crisis in America. So he hid that from them. They took the biopsies and sent these biopsies to medical, what they called, for medical analysis. It said that the saliva glands had become infected in his mouth and that maybe that's why the tumors grew, but they didn't think it was cancer. But he did not want to let the American people know that he was sick. So he went out on a ship off of Long Island, and they did an operation there aboard the ship called the, or actually a yacht called Oneida. He did not want them to go outside in his face so they could see him that he had been operated on. So they went to the roof of his mouth to avoid any external scars. They put him on nitrous oxide, which is sleeping or laughing gas, and ether. And they removed parts of his upper jaw and hard palate. It left the operation or Cleveland's mouth disfigured. And they corrected this by putting in a hard rubber dental prosthesis. That corrected his speech and restored his appearance. But they said he was on vacation. And then they said that he had two bad teeth pulled. They later wrote that it wasn't really benign. but it was cancerous, but it was a very slow-growing cancer. And they diagnosed it as varicose carcinoma, a low-grade epithelial cancer with low potential for mastocytes. No new states were added during his administration, even though we could have had Hawaii. But before he left office, the Enabling Act of 1889 authorized North and South Dakota, Montana and Washington to form state governments and to gain admission to the Union. He said it was necessary for these to become states. All four became officially states in November of 1889, during the first year of Benjamin Harrison's administration. But it was Grover Cleveland that initiated it. In his second administration he became very unpopular because of the Great Depression. They asked him about women's suffrage. You know what women's suffrage is, girls? That means women's right to vote. And he didn't believe in that. He didn't believe in the Temperance Act either. He says women's suffrage movement should be sensible and responsible. Women do not want to vote. Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. He said, the relative positions to be assumed by men and women in working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence. That didn't make him very popular with women. They later on wanted him to, in 1906, to run for Senate of the United States Senate of New Jersey. He didn't want it. He enjoyed his retirement. In 1908, after a series of serious illnesses, he suffered a heart attack and died on June 24th at the age of 71 years old. And the last words that he ever spoke, he said, I have tried hard to do that which is right. I have tried hard all my life to do that which is right. And I believe that he did his best. There are many places named after him. He was buried in the Princeton Cemetery at the Nassau Presbyterian Church. Cleveland Hall, Grover Cleveland Hall and the Buffalo State College in Buffalo, New York is named after him. Grover Cleveland Middle School is named after him and his birthplace, Caldwell, New Jersey. Grover Cleveland High School in Buffalo, New York, is named after him. The town of Cleveland, Mississippi, and Mount Cleveland, a volcano in Alaska, is also named after Grover Cleveland. He was the first state, printed, the first president who was ever filmed, and the first president who ever recorded his voice. A U.S. post stamp was given his offer in 1923, the 12-cent issue. And it was accompanied by a 13-cent issue. And also, Cleveland's portrait is on the $1,000 bill of the series 1928 and series 1934. He also appeared on a few issues of the $20 Federal Reserve notes from 1914. He was both the 22nd and 24th President of the United States, and he's featured on two separate dollar coins issued in 2012 as part of the Presidential One Dollar Coin Act of 2005. He was inducted in 2013 into the New Jersey Hall of Fame. Grover Cleveland was an honest man that tried to do the best that he could for the country. He was not anything related to any Democrat today, that I can say. He believed in small government. He believed in a government that was here to protect the people from each other. He believed in capital punishment for the wrongdoers, and he actually pulled the trapdoor on two hangings. He administered capital punishment two times in his life, at least. Sometimes people say three. He is a man that we can look up to and say that he did his best. He did not look for wealth and riches in politics. He worked hard for his living and he believed the government wasn't supposed to have your pocketbooks. You didn't get into the government to get rich. You got into the government as a public trust. And with that public trust, you did the best you could to limit that government and limit that government's intervention in people's lives. He tried to lower taxes and he tried his best to make government accountable for what they did. Our Father, we send this little message out for your honor, for your glory. And Father, use it to help us set standards in our lives and in our world today to remember what this great man did for our country. He made mistakes, we know, but he did his best. It was not with the corruption that he made the mistakes. It was just judgment that he couldn't see far enough ahead. Father, please forgive me for I failed you.