During his second term, Grover Cleveland fashioned himself into the Andrew Johnson of the 1890s: a man spectacularly unsuited by temperament and belief for his time and his place. In his first term, Cleveland had established himself as a politician happiest when saying no. He vetoed more bills, most of them pension bills, than any president before him. During his second term, while presiding over the most severe economic downturn of the nineteenth century, he worried mainly about the danger of government paternalism, walking backward into the future undoing what the Republicans had done. He
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