Grover Cleveland’s lesson for Trump

Plus: Even George Washington was a tyrant |

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By Made by History / Produced by Olivia B. Waxman Only one other man has pulled off what Donald Trump has now achieved: winning the White House back after losing it. But, as Luke Voyles writes in Made by History, his story is a cautionary note for the GOP.  President Grover Cleveland was a figure in many ways similar to Trump: an unlikely politician who butted heads with the media and ignored economists on tariffs, and who cared little about party unity. He didn’t change between his first and second terms, and that ended up proving devastating for Democrats. When the Panic of 1893 hit just after his second term began, Cleveland's response split his party and led to disastrous midterm elections in 1894—which left the Democrats in the minority in the House for 16 years, and the Senate for 18 years. By the end of Cleveland’s second term, he was so estranged from his fellow Democrats that he publicly opposed their presidential nominee. The lesson of Cleveland, Voyles argues, is that a second term can quickly go sour if the President hasn't learned from the mistakes of his first.

HISTORY ON TIME.COM Grover Cleveland’s Second Term Offers a Warning for Donald Trump and the GOP By Luke Voyles / Made by History The only president before Trump to win, lose, and win again ended up decimating his own party during his second term. Read More » The Last Time the Senate Rejected a President’s Cabinet Nominee of the Same Party By Simmone Shah The last time the Senate rejected a President's Cabinet nominee of the same party was in 1925, when Coolidge nominated Warren for AG. Read More » Even George Washington Was a Tyrant By Karin Wulf / Made by History We don't need to find heroes in our past presidents. We need to try to understand that tyranny has always been part of American freedom. Read More » Conservative Masculinity’s Contradictory Attitude Toward Gay Men Has a Long History By Christopher Ewing / Made by History History shows how conservative masculinity's reliance on traditional gender roles can coexist with embrace of aspects of gay identity. Read More » What Democrats Can Learn from America's First Black Voters By J. Jacob Calhoun / Made by History After the Civil War, Black voters faced danger and violence—and they fought for political power against all odds. Read More »

FROM THE TIME VAULT This week in 1962: Joan Baez TIME The Nov. 23, 1962, cover of TIME “The people who promote her records and concerts are forever saying that ‘she speaks to her generation.’ They may be right, since her generation seems to prefer her to all others. If the subtle and emotional content of her attitude is getting through to her contemporaries, she at least has an idea of what she is trying to say to them and why they want to hear it. ‘When I started singing, I felt as though we had just so long to live, and I still feel that way,’ she says. ‘It’s looming over your head. The kids who sing feel they really don’t have a future—so they pick up a guitar and play. It’s a desperate sort of thing, and there’s a whole lost bunch of them.’” Read More » This week in 1970: Sesame Street BILL PIERCE The Nov. 23, 1970, cover of TIME “Sesame Street has been sharpening the cognitive skills of poor kids by as much as 62%. In its first series, the show reached almost 7,000,000 preschool children every day, five days a week. The Rubber Duckie Song was on the charts for nine weeks. Big Bird became one of Flip Wilson’s first guests. Sesame Street won a Peabody Award, three Emmys and two dozen other prizes for excellence. Former Commissioner of Education James E. Allen saluted the show: President Nixon wrote a fan letter. Indeed, despite the show’s announcements that it has been brought to you ‘by the Letter Y and the Number Three,’ Sesame Street has been backed like a Government bond, nurtured like a Broadway musical.” Read More » This week in 1999: Pokémon TIME The Nov. 22, 1999, cover of TIME “Yet collecting Pokémon and pitting them against one another is not a new kind of quest, simply one tweaked with technology. In Asia, fathers and grandfathers still tell of growing up in the midst of World War II, of nights of not knowing what to do with yourself except sneak into the tall grass of the countryside to catch crickets, then take them home, cupped in your hand, to raise in the dark of matchboxes, training the insects for fights with the crickets of other boys who have been on the same nocturnal hunt. The more experience each cricket has had, the better a fighter it becomes–the tiny surrogate for the boy unable to fight in the war going on all around him. Pokemon is that kind of game. Except that there are many kinds of crickets, and all are potentially friendly monsters with fabulous powers. And nobody dies.” Read More »

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