page_title: Adlai Stevenson I
section_title: Vice President, 1893–1897
hierarchical_section_title: Adlai Stevenson I / Vice President, 1893–1897
caption_attribution_description: English: 1892 Democratic Poster showing the Cleveland-Stevenson ticket.
context_page_description: Adlai Ewing Stevenson served as the 23rd vice president of the United States from 1893 to 1897. Previously, he served as a representative from Illinois in the late 1870s and early 1880s. After his subsequent appointment as assistant postmaster general of the United States during Grover Cleveland's first administration, he fired many Republican postal workers and replaced them with Southern Democrats. This earned him the enmity of the Republican-controlled Congress, but made him a favorite as Grover Cleveland's running mate in 1892, and he duly became vice president of the United States.
  In office, he supported the free-silver lobby against the gold-standard men like Cleveland, but was praised for ruling in a dignified, non-partisan manner.
  In 1900, he ran for vice president with William Jennings Bryan. In doing so, he became the fourth vice president or former vice president to run for that post with two different presidential candidates. Stevenson was the grandfather of Adlai Stevenson II, a Governor of Illinois and the unsuccessful Democratic presidential nominee in both 1952 and 1956.
context_section_description: Cleveland was renominated for President on the first ballot at the 1892 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. At the time, the vice presidency was considered a "final resting place for has-beens and never-wases." Nonetheless, Stevenson's brothers and cousins advocated for his nomination for the position. Likewise, Mayor of Chicago Carter Harrison threw his support behind Stevenson as a native son, believing that he could influence the state to vote Democratic. Stevenson was nominated on the first ballot.
  Stevenson backed off his former support of greenbacks in favor of Cleveland's gold standard policy. Unlike Cleveland, who only appeared once in public to support his candidacy, Stevenson traveled with his wife across the country. Cleveland's advisers sent Stevenson to the south to curb the growing appeal of the Populist Party. With his Kentucky roots, Stevenson proved popular at his southern engagements. Stevenson also publicly opposed the Lodge Bill, a proposed bill which would have enfranchised southern blacks. The winning Cleveland-Stevenson ticket carried Illinois, although not Stevenson's home district.
  Civil service reformers held out hope for the second Cleveland administration but saw Vice President Stevenson as a symbol of the spoils system. He never hesitated to feed names of Democrats to the Post Office Department. Once he called at the US Treasury Department to protest against an appointment and was shown a letter he had written endorsing the candidate. Stevenson told the treasury officials not to pay attention to any of his written endorsements; if he really favored someone he would tell them personally.
  A habitual cigar-smoker, Cleveland developed cancer of the mouth that required immediate surgery in the summer of 1893. The president insisted that the surgery be kept secret to avoid another panic on Wall Street.  While on a yacht in New York harbor that summer, Cleveland had his entire upper jaw removed and replaced with an artificial device, an operation that left no outward scar. The cancer surgery remained secret for another quarter century. Cleveland's aides explained that he had merely had dental work. His vice president little realized how close he came to the presidency that summer.
  Adlai Stevenson enjoyed his role as vice president, presiding over the U.S. Senate, "the most august legislative assembly known to men." He won praise for ruling in a dignified, nonpartisan manner. In personal appearance he stood six feet tall and was "of fine personal bearing and uniformly courteous to all." Although he was often a guest at the White House, Stevenson admitted that he was less an adviser to the president than "the neighbor to his counsels." He credited the President with being "courteous at all times" but noted that "no guards were necessary to the preservation of his dignity. No one would have thought of undue familiarity." For his part, President Cleveland snorted that the Vice President had surrounded himself with a coterie of free-silver men dubbed the "Stevenson cabinet." The president even mused that the economy had gotten so bad and the Democratic party so divided that "the logical thing for me to do ... was to resign and hand the Executive branch to Mr. Stevenson," joking that he would try to get his friends jobs in Stevenson's new cabinet.
caption: A campaign poster for "Cleve and Steve"
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