Norwich bulletin., 1920-05-31
Five Minutes a Day With Our Presidents
Copyright 1s2o-By James Morgan

Iss5-March 1, Grover Cleveland i'm
 augurated a2 President, aged
 AZ.
 I8ss-March l, sent his "innocuous
 desuetude" message to the
 Senate.
 ISs7-March, appointed the first In-
 terstate Commerce Commis-
 sion, Decembef, sent his fam
 ous tariff message to Congress.
 1sss-Defeated for reelection.
 Grover Cleveland was the Moses whom Destiny hid in the bulrushes that he might in good time lead the Democrats out of their A years of bondage to de- feat. The times demanded new deal, and this called for a- new man.
 When the President-elect arrived in Washington, it may well be that he could not unaided have found his way to the White House. Certainly he had never been in it. Some say he never had been in town before and another story has It that he had visited it once, but only for few hours while he hurried through some legal business.
 Nevertheless, the heavy figure of the almost unknown President-elect stalked into the unfamiliar Senate Gambler with calm self-possession. Nor did he nsr- vously tumble a manuscript and read his inaugural, as the custom is. The veter- an Statesmen, in whose midst he stood for the first time, should have been warned by the spectacle of this novice on the National stage, striding out onto the eastern pertico of the Capitol with out sheet of paper in his hand and coolly addressing in his high, penetrat- ing voice the largest audience ever as- Snmhied for inauguration,
 AS he took the oath he departed from the time e-honored precedent of swearing on a new copy of the Scriptures, which the clerk of the Supreme Court always has in readiness for the occasion. He had brought his own, the old faded Bible his mother gave him when he left his boyhoed home. And on it's fly leaf was the inscription her fond hand had written Stephen Grover Cleveland.
 Here was a man who was to make his own precedents, a man who was to care for nothing that had happened be- fore he happened. The first President after the Civil War to have had no part in that strife, he was without a political past, and his face was turned wholly to the future.
 he took from the South, which had been ' On the other hand, he appointed a negro to the best-paying office in the District of Columbia.
 He struck dis7nay to the greedy hopes of the Democrats, after their long wan dering in wilderness without spoTs by announcing that he would let the Re publican ofice-holders finish their terms with the exceptions of those who had been guilty of offensive partisanship.' When the Republican Senate attempted to interfere with such removals as he did make, he objected to the revival ot an old statute after an existence ot nearly 20 years of almost innocuous de suetude." That phrase was too mucf for the Senators, and the act was re pealed.
 Although a strong partisan. who ap. pointed none but Democrats, Cleevland' stiff-neeked resistance to his party. claror for "clean sweep" lid more tt dull the abnormal appetite for public place than anything that had been dont before in SO years. When Samuel J Tl3en was asked if this new leader hat backbone, the old sage of Greystont Equeaked, Backbone! He has so muct sf it. it makes him stick out in front ? Never could any one in politics say no more ungraciously than Cleveland His grudging, disdatnful doiidg out o