Long-Hand, Hard Head

LETTERS OF GROVER CLEVELAND--Selected & edited by Allan Nevins--Houghton Mifflin ($5).

A man's letters, written always for an audience but seldom for publication,* are apt to give a better likeness of him than his posed and dressed-up biographical portrait. If he was a good letter-writer, they are better reading. But Grover Cleveland was not a good letter-writer. Says Editor Allan Nevins, whose Life of Cleveland was the 1933 Pulitzer-Prizewinning biography: "It was characteristic of Cleveland that he wrote many letters about public business, few about his personal affairs or personal feelings."

Cleveland wrote more letters than "the inarticulate Grant," fewer than Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson. His interests were narrow: "He wrote when affairs required it, but seldom spontaneously and never discursively. . . ." Even in the White House he never dictated or used a typewriter, "and the number of letters he could indite with his own heavy fist was limited." The two best and most-famed letters in this collection are telegrams. When his political enemies tried to spike his campaign shortly after his nomination for the Presidency (1884) by exaggerating the truth about his "illegitimate son," he wired a Buffalo supporter: "Whatever you do, tell the truth." When William Randolph Hearst wanted to add his name to a list of prominent citizens endorsing Hearst's proposed memorial to sailors lost in the Maine (1898), Cleveland telegraphed him: "I decline to allow my sorrow for those who died on the Maine to be perverted to an advertising scheme for the New York Journal." One of his letters to Andrew Carnegie thanks him for a present of Scotch; another (written as a trustee of Princeton University) advises Carnegie to give a proposed benefaction in the form of endowment for the Graduate School. (Instead, Carnegie gave Princeton an artificial lake.)

Cleveland as a letter-writer was this side of dull, but he was impressive. Many a reader of this collection will agree with its editor that its author "possessed his measure of faults, and was pent in by even more limitations than usually afflict the race of politicians. But he had a soul that in its simple and unpretending fashion was truly heroic, and to touch his garment is to receive virtue."

* Notable exception: Alexander Pope (1688-1744), who kept copies of his love letters to Martha Blount, afterwards published them.

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