Grover Cleveland - Bibliography

The Cleveland papers are in the Library of Congress. The standard biography of Cleveland is Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage (New York, 1932); it is accurate, detailed, and well written, but it takes Cleveland too much on his own terms and is consequently rather old-fashioned and lacking in insight on some questions. Nevins also edited a useful volume of Cleveland's correspondence, Letters of Grover Cleveland, 1850–1908 (New York, 1933). A more critical, if rather brief, life is Horace Samuel Merrill, Bourbon Leader: Grover Cleveland and the Democratic Party (Boston, 1957). Robert M. McElroy, Grover Cleveland: The Man and the Statesman , 2 vols. (New York, 1923), the first full-length biography, is uncritical. See also George F. Parker, Recollections of Grover Cleveland (New York, 1909).

There are many excellent studies of the political events of the Cleveland years. Harold U. Faulkner, Politics, Reform, and Expansion: 1890–1900 (New York, 1959), is a general survey of the period that also contains a full bibliography listing the principal biographies of Cleveland's contemporaries. These works throw much light on Cleveland as well as their subjects. J. Rogers Hollingsworth, The Whirligig of Politics: The Democracy of Cleveland and Bryan (Chicago, 1963), is useful, as is Samuel T. McSeveney, The Politics of Depression: Political Behavior in the Northeast, 1893–1896 (New York, 1972).

Broader in scope are Matthew Josephson, The Politicos: 1865–1896 (New York, 1938), which, while overly critical of just about all the political leaders of the time and of the era itself, is lively and insightful, and H. Wayne Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877–1896 (Syracuse, N.Y., 1969), which is up-to-date and more favorably inclined to all concerned. Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late-Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), contains a wealth of fascinating background material on the era.

For Cleveland's foreign policy, see Ernest R. May, Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power (New York, 1961), and Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1963), the latter generally critical of American policy, which LaFeber considers to have been dominated by the desire for commercial expansion. John A. S. Grenville and George B. Young, Politics, Strategy, and American Diplomacy: Studies in Foreign Policy, 1873–1917 (New Haven, Conn., 1966), contains interesting essays on a variety of relevant issues.

Books dealing with specific foreign policy issues of the Cleveland era include Merze Tate, The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom: A Political History (New Haven, Conn., 1965), and A. E. Campbell, Great Britain and the United States, 1895–1903 (Westport, Conn., 1974).

Recent works include Alyn Brodsky, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Character (New York, 2000) Henry F. Graff, Grover Cleveland (New York, 2002), and H. Paul Jeffers, An Honest President: The Life and Presidencies of Grover Cleveland (New York, 2000).

Further sources are listed in John F. Marszalek, comp., Grover Cleveland: A Bibliography (Westport, Conn., 1988).