It should come as no surprise to learn that a president having serious health problems is something that is often hidden from the public. Either for the sake of one’s own career or to not arouse the public and potentially create hysteria, issues have been hidden, and hidden well. Two of the more notable examples are with President’s FDR and Woodrow Wilson. The former was paralyzed from the waist down due to polio in 1921 and all that the public knew was that he needed a cane to walk while the latter suffered a debilitating stroke that incapacitated him for the last 18 months of his presidency and the public did not know just how bad the stroke was.

President Grover Cleveland has been in the news a bit these past twelve months as President Trump successfully attempted to become the second man to serve two non-consecutive terms in office. The first man to do this, of course, was former Erie County Sheriff and Buffalo mayor, Grover Cleveland, who served as the 22nd and 24th president of the United States. Much of his life remains unknown to the average American; there are even things unknown about him to those who are fans of history. One largely unknown notable thing about President Cleveland occurred on 1 July 1893, and it involved surgery of his mouth. The president was never a picture of health, as he had gout, frequently smoked cigars, was overweight and it was said that he only stood up to find another place to sit down.

 

Cleveland’s second term began on 4 March 1893 and the nation was not in a good spot. The Panic of 1893 hit beginning in February, lasted eight months and was the worst period of economic depression in American history until the Great Depression. There several issues that led to this depression, including a run on gold as people horded bullion coins as there was a widespread distrust of paper money, banking crisis’ in Australia, South Africa and Argentina, the economic policies of President Harrison, and the ‘bubble bursting’ on the railroads as they were over built and overly extended. The results of all this was disastrous, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropping 21% in one day, the closures of 500 banks, 15000 businesses and many farms going under. Unemployment in our state reached 35% alone! In Western New York, this panic and ensuing economic downturn led to the Love Canal catstraphore because the building of the canal was abandoned and the one mile length that was completed would eventually be used as a toxic waste dump site.

 

Not long after the inauguration, Cleveland began to notice a rough bumpy patch on the roof of his mouth; it grew rapidly. The White House physician, Dr. Robert O’Reilly, told him that it was a cancerous tumor and it had to be removed or he would die. Due to the huge crisis consuming the nation and not wanting to cause further panic,the president said nothing about this. The president said that he needed to take a small vacation  to clear his thoughts and fish on a friend’s (Elias Cornelius Benedict)  yacht, the Oneida. There, on Long Island Sound, the president was strapped to a chair, sedated and Dr. Joseph Bryant and his team of six surgeons went to work. To avoid any scars or anything, the surgeons went through the President’s mouth; the amount of the upper left jaw and palate that had to be removed left him disfigured nonetheless. Through another surgery, Cleveland was fitted with a hard rubber dental prosthesis that basically corrected the disfigurement and speech problems. The press was suspicious as disappearing for four days even in 1893 was very unusual for a president so the cover story was that two bad teeth were removed. Every doctor was sworn to secrecy so even when a journalist in Philadelphia, E.J. Edwards, wrote about what actually happened, the White House came down hard, denying the truth, discrediting Edwards and tried to destroy his reputation. President Cleveland would finish his term four years later and died in 1908 of a heart attack at age 71.

 

His surgery was one literally for the history books. The fact that he was seated, the surgery taking just 90 minutes (it is a four or so hour surgery today) and on a boat in moving water is truly remarkable and the doctors are to be commended for that they accomplished; medical books still discuss just how audacious this event really was. As for E.J. Edwards, one of the surgeons, Dr. William Keen came clean 24 years after the fact. As one of just three witnesses still alive, he wrote an article to do the right thing and vindicate E.J. Edwards, who luckily was also still alive. The closest President Cleveland ever came to confessing the truth was in a letter he wrote to a friend, which part of it said, “The report you saw regarding my health resulted from a most astounding breach of professional duty on the part of a medical man… I tell you this in strict confidence for the policy here has been to deny and discredit this story.” With the past two presidents there seems to still be a covering up of health conditions, from President Biden’s overall health decline that was denied to President Trump’s medical records not being made public and declaring himself the fittest of any president. As both history and the present has shown, covering up the president’s health is a tradition that lives on.