Grover Cleveland vs Donald Trump

Many People Compare Them For One Obvious Reason, But...

Yesterday, for President’s Day, the [Jewish Daily] Forward, rated every president for their Jewishness. Of Trump, they noted “First president to have a Jewish daughter. First president to suggest Neo-Nazis were ‘very fine people’ on national television and sign the Yad Vashem guest book ‘so amazing and will never forget.’ Credit where it’s due, the Abraham Accords and the move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem were very big deals. Will it be what most American Jews remember him for? I doubt it.

Jewish rating: Ketchup on the Kushner brisket”

But the summary that interested me most was the one they wrote about Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th president, at the very end of the 19th Century, right when the U.S. was experiencing its biggest ever wave of immigration— the wave that made Americans the greatest and wealthiest country in the world. During this time, the foreign-born in the U.S. went from 90% from England, Ireland and Germany to just 45% from those countries. Between 1880 and 1914 over 20 million Europeans migrated to the U.S., a country that had a population of just 75 million!

From The Forward’s perspective: “When Austria-Hungary refused Cleveland’s pick for ambassador, A.M. Kiely, because he was married to a Jew, Cleveland refused to appoint a replacement for a year. We love to see that kind of righteous pettiness. Cleveland vetoed a limit on non-Christian immigrants and after his two non-consecutive terms, publicly spoke out against the ‘wholesale murder’ of the Kishinev Pogrom. He was not Jewish…

Jewish rating: Membership at the 92nd Street Y

In Cleveland’s time, steam-powered ships brought millions of young immigrants to the U.S. from Italy and the Russian Empire. My grandfather and his brothers and sisters came from Russia soon after Cleveland’s presidency. My grandfather and one sister were allowed into New York. Ten others wound up in Brazil. In not for Cleveland, my grandfather wouldn’t have been allowed to disembark in New York either.

Cleveland was not from Ohio. He was born in New Jersey (1837) and served as mayor of Buffalo and then governor of New York, where he worked closely— and across the aisle— with state Assembly minority leader Teddy Roosevelt to pass a progressive reform agenda… which helps explain how he won the popular vote in 3 consecutive elections— although not the electoral college vote in the middle one, ceding the presidency to one of history’s lowlights, Benjamin Harrison who opposed Jewish immigration from Russia.

A xenophobic, nativist, group, the Immigration Restriction League was founded in 1894 by upper class Northeast Brahmins worried that Anglo-Saxon traditions, peoples, and culture were being replaced— back then they called it “drowned in a flood of racially inferior foreigners from Southern and Eastern Europe.” One of the founders was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who managed to pass a bill (the Immigration Act of 1897) meant to exclude people who weren’t literate in English— particularly Italians, Greeks and Jews from Russia and Poland— claiming that they were racially inferior and asserting that the American way of life was threatened by Jews and southern Europeans immigrating to the U.S. 

The goal was to maintain Old Stock American hegemony. Another motivation was to severely limit the number of non-Protestants admitted to the country. Back then, many proponents of harsh immigration restriction were anti-Semites who sought to limit the influx of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, where many Jewish communities were located.

Cleveland vetoed the bill in 1897 primarily because he believed it violated the principles of equality and fairness enshrined in the Constitution. In his veto message, he argued that the literacy test and other restrictive measures would discriminate against immigrants based on their national origin and religion. He emphasized the importance of maintaining the United States as a haven for immigrants seeking freedom and opportunity, regardless of their background.