This article is a part of our series From Lighthouses to Electric Chargers: A Presidential Series on Transportation Innovations 

Photo of Grover Cleveland.  Source: National Archives. 

Railroads were the industry of the day when Grover Cleveland was elected president in 1884. The first Democrat to win the presidency since the Civil War, he capitalized on his image as an anti-corruption crusader. Tammany Hall, the powerful New York-based municipal political machine, opposed his candidacy, setting Cleveland apart from other elected officials in the Democratic party at this time, particularly in New York.  

In 1869, over a decade before President Cleveland assumed office, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads inaugurated the nation’s transcontinental railroad for freight and passenger rail use. At that time, Central Pacific Railroad president Leland Stanford ceremonially drove in the railroad’s last “Golden Spike” at Promontory Summit in Utah. 

Yet in the years following the transcontinental railroad’s completion, allegations of widespread graft and unfair business practices spread widely. As historian Richard White writes in his book Railroaded: “The railroads made 19th century Americans realize that space was political. It was a disconcerting recognition because…space was natural…politics was cultural…” If Americans were used to understanding maps and distance as absolute or fixed, railroads changed that. White argues that with railroads, “people had to measure space primarily by cost” which “rendered it radically unstable.”    

White argues that even railroad companies themselves had little knowledge of the true time and cost to move particular goods, leading to unstable prices and rates that were in no way tied to distance. And indeed, in this era, railroads’ prices of freight and passenger transport were subject to rapid and unannounced changes. Eventually, “…railroads priced goods according to what a given commodity could bear.” 

During Cleveland’s tenure, concerns about monopolistic practices of railroad leaders and Gilded Age “Robber Barons”—particularly regarding the U.S. government’s expropriations of private Americans’ land for future railroad projects, and their outright gifts of public land—led to a groundswell of popular outrage. The president used the Department of the Interior to respond.  

As an example, in 1887, Cleveland sent a symbolic letter to the Secretary of the Interior “Concerning Settlement on Railroad Lands,” focusing on conflicting claims of a settler named Guilford Miller and the Northern Pacific Railroad Company to lands in what was then the Washington Territory. The Cleveland Administration deliberately publicized the letter in a way that conveyed the presidents’s support of an individual aggrieved property owner over the interests of a greedy railroad company. Cleveland declared:  

Miller claims to be a settler upon the land in question, whose possession dates from 1878. He alleges that he has made substantial improvements upon this land and cultivated the same; and it appears that he filed his claim to the same under the homestead law on the 29th day of December, 1884. 

The railroad company contends that this land is within the territory or area from which it was entitled to select such a quantity of public land as might be necessary to supply any deficiency that shall be found to exist in the specified land mentioned in a grant by the government to said company in aid of the construction of its road,  

… 

The Attorney-General is of the opinion that such withdrawal and reservation were at all times effectual, and that they operated to prevent Miller from acquiring any interest in or right to the land claimed by him. 

With this interpretation of the law and the former orders and action of the Interior Department, it will be seen that their effect has been the withdrawal and reservation since 1872 of thousands, if not millions, of acres of these lands from the operation of the land laws of the United States, thus placing them beyond the reach of our citizens desiring under such laws to settle and make homes upon the same, and that this has been done for the benefit of a railroad company having no fixed, certain, or definite interests in such lands.  

With this letter and others like it, the Cleveland Administration sent a clear signal to the American public that the president thought railroads were exploiting grants from the federal government and encroaching on private citizens’ space, all for land that the railroads did not urgently need. Cleveland would stand instead with Americans’ land claims.  

However, Americans still expressed widespread complaints about railroads’ rates and policies, and an 1886 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court (Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railway Company v. Illinois) prevented states from regulating interstate rail service in any way, leaving federal regulation as the only option. Accordingly, Congress passed and Cleveland signed the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. The Act created the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), whose mandate included government regulation of all interstate railroads. Eventually, the ICC’s scope expanded to include all modes of transportation known as “common carriers,” including ships, airlines, taxi services, and more. The ICC was the country’s first independent regulatory agency. Although Cleveland supported its creation, he soon expressed reservations about the agency and about the regulatory power of the administrative state.  

The Interstate Commerce Commission, established by Congress and signed into law by President Cleveland, involved independent state regulation of private industry (in this case railroads) for the first time. Image available here.  

Cleveland lost his reelection bid in 1888 to the Republican candidate, Benjamin Harrison, but four years later he defeated Harrison by a wide margin thanks to the rise of a new political party, the Populists, that siphoned off voters in the west. 

However, two major events early in Cleveland’s second term led to his growing unpopularity. First, the Panic of 1893 began after the bankruptcy of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroads. Then came two interrelated Pullman Strikes in Chicago in 1894. Both events led to a period of deep economic recession in America, and ultimately shaped the rules of national labor policy as the American Railway Union advocated for their rights against the Chicago-based Pullman train-car factory.   

Members of the National Guard firing at striking railroad workers in July 1894. Source: G.W. Peters.  

President Cleveland violently broke the nationwide Pullman Strikes, arrested union leaders, and jailed them on various charges. Gone was his image as a regulatory crusader against “captains of industry.” Yet others saw Cleveland as having “saved the nation from forces of socialism and anarchy.”  

Stefan Chavez-Norgaard, PhD, is a Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of Denver. He conducts research on the intersection of urban politics, planning, and development.