Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [114]
But amid the tales of financial disaster in the papers that morning were stories reflecting the almost naïve optimism of what has come to be called the Gilded Age. Arctic explorer Robert Peary was on his way to Greenland for the second time. The massive engines of the navy’s newest battleship, the Maine, were successfully tested at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. At the World’s Fair in Chicago, final preparations were underway for the grandest Fourth of July celebration ever. And excited crowds were packing National League ballparks, eager to see the results of the new, longer distance between the pitcher’s mound and home plate: sixty feet, six inches. They rarely went home disappointed. Batting averages rose faster than interest rates.
As far as Grover Cleveland was concerned, though, the best news in the papers that day came from an unlikely source: his old foe, Benjamin Harrison. Speaking to reporters in New York, the former president announced his support for repealing the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which he had signed into law three years before. Harrison conceded that repealing the act would have a positive effect on public opinion, which he held responsible for the crumbling economy: “I do not attribute all of the evils of the present financial situation to the Sherman Act, but in the imagination of the people; that is one strong cause, and so I believe that its repeal would be beneficial.” It was feeble affirmation, but it was good enough for Cleveland, who had won a symbolically important, if grudging, ally. For the first time in weeks, he must have put the morning papers down with a smile.
That morning, Cleveland worked feverishly to clear his desk—literally. The president did not share W. W. Keen’s “love of order.” His massive Resolute desk was always covered with piles of paper. As president, he was required to personally sign a mountain of documents every day—military commissions, land grants, diplomatic correspondence. Cleveland never learned how to properly dictate to a stenographer, so he answered in his own hand every letter he received, no matter how mundane. He also wrote drafts of his speeches in longhand. The piles on his desk occasionally grew tall enough to obscure the enormous president behind them. Now facing an extended “vacation,” Cleveland was eager to leave behind as little work as possible.
Later that day, Cleveland signed the commissions of four naval cadets, including the first two to be trained in steam engineering.
He also signed the proclamation summoning Congress for a special session to consider repealing the Silver Purchase Act. The lawmakers were to convene on August 7. It would be just the eleventh special session ever called by a president. In a draft of the proclamation, War Secretary Dan Lamont scribbled in the margin: “Written the day the president left Washington on account of illness.” Lamont, of course, was the only member of Cleveland’s cabinet aware of the impending operation.
Around four o’clock that afternoon, Cleveland and Lamont climbed into the White House carriage and rode down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Baltimore and Potomac train station, where Garfield had been shot twelve years earlier. No bodyguards accompanied them. The Secret Service would not begin protecting presidents until the following year, when agents uncovered a plot by a group of gamblers in Colorado to assassinate Cleveland, perhaps at the behest of pro-silver forces.
At the station they boarded a special Pullman that was attached to the end of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s New York Express. The Pullman belonged to Frank