Cleveland In The Gilded Age

Cleveland storyteller Dan Ruminski discovered that the 6 acres under his home were originally part of a 1,400-acre grand estate known as the Circle W Farm created by Walter White, founding brother of the White Motor Company. Drawn in by the fascinating history, Ruminski's investigation soon embraced the full legacy of Cleveland's industrial history and the indomitable characters who created the city's Gilded Age. John D. Rockefeller, Samuel Mather and more giants of industry built Cleveland's Millionaires' Row. Come peek inside the once-grand mansions these millionaires called home and hear the delightful stories that bring the past to life. Join Ruminski and Alan Dutka on a return to this section of Euclid Avenue, which wasn't merely the most stunning show of wealth in Cleveland but also in the entire country.

Cleveland storyteller Dan Ruminski discovered that the 6 acres under his home were originally part of a 1,400-acre grand estate known as the Circle W Farm created by Walter White, founding brother of the White Motor Company. Drawn in by the fascinating history, Ruminski's investigation soon embraced the full legacy of Cleveland's industrial history and the indomitable characters who created the city's Gilded Age. John D. Rockefeller, Samuel Mather and more giants of industry built Cleveland's Millionaires' Row. Come peek inside the once-grand mansions these millionaires called home and hear the delightful stories that bring the past to life. Join Ruminski and Alan Dutka on a return to this section of Euclid Avenue, which wasn't merely the most stunning show of wealth in Cleveland but also in the entire country.

The incredible affluence and extravagance of Euclid Avenue's Millionaires' Row have fascinated Clevelanders for more than a century. Within these stately mansions, US presidents enjoyed dinners and discussions with powerful politicians and influential industrial and banking leaders. Through photographs and meticulously researched captions, Cleveland's Millionaires' Row provides authoritative visual and written answers to the most often-asked questions regarding the famous avenue: where were these mansions located, how did their occupants acquire such enormous wealth, what caused the street's demise, and what replaced the famous old homes? The book also reveals the progress in remaking Euclid Avenue's four-mile stretch from Public Square to University Circle. Cleveland's Millionaires' Row vividly illustrates the birth, glamor, decline, and renaissance of the grand old avenue.

Cleveland storyteller Dan Ruminski discovered that the 6 acres under his home were originally part of a 1,400-acre grand estate known as the Circle W Farm. The impressive estate was created by Walter White, founding brother of the White Motor Company. Drawn in by the fascinating history, Ruminski's investigation soon embraced the full legacy of Cleveland's industrial history and the indomitable characters who created the city's Gilded Age. John D. Rockefeller, Samuel Mather and more giants of industry built Cleveland's Millionaires' Row. Come peek inside the once-grand mansions these millionaires called home and hear the delightful stories that bring the past to life. Join Ruminski and Alan Dutka on a return to this section of Euclid Avenue, which wasn't merely the most stunning show of wealth in Cleveland but also in the entire country.

Covers all the people, events, movements, subjects, court cases, inventions, and more that defined the Gilded Age.

In cooperation with Western Reserve Historical Society Euclid Avenue, which runs through the heart of downtown Cleveland, was for 60 years one of the finest residential streets of any city in 19th century America. Showplace of America is the fascinating account of the rise and fall of this elegant promenade, including portrayals of the eminent architects who created its opulent residences and colorful details about the lives of the wealthy people who occupied them. The families who resided within this linear, four-mile neighborhood epitomized Midwestern grandeur in the second half of the 19th century. The 1893 Baedeker's travel guide to the United States labeled it "one of the most beautiful residence-streets in America," as others hailed it "Millionaires' Row," the finest avenue in the west, and the most beautiful street in the world." Modeled after the grand boulevards of Europe, this magnificent neighborhood was distinguished for the prominence of its architects as well as the families who lived there. Local architects Jonathan Goldsmith, Charles W. Heard, Levi T. Scofield, Charles F. Schweinfurth, and Coburn & Barnum and national firms Peabody & Stearns and McKim, Mead & White created houses that were stunning monuments to Cleveland and America's growing prosperity. Ironically, the tremendous success of Cleveland's industry and commerce, which had nurtured the rise of this grand avenue, fostered its fall. Downtown commerce expanded along the avenue at the sacrifice of its leading entrepreneurs' residential have. The houses were demolished as the avenue became what is today--a neglected urban thoroughfare. Photographs and illustrations from the archives of the Western Reserve Historical Society and other repositories are published here for the first time, documenting both the glory and decline of the "showplace of America."

Grover Cleveland, who served as both the twenty-second and the twenty-fourth president of the United States, dominated the American political scene from 1884 to 1896. Viewed at one time as a monument of presidential courage, Cleveland has over the past generation been dismissed by historians as a "Bourbon Democrat," the symbol of that wing of the Democratic party devoted to preserving the status quo and protecting the interests of the propertied. In this revisionist study, Richard Welch takes a fresh look at the Cleveland administrations and discovers a man whose assertive temperament was frequently at odds with his inherited political faith. Although pledging public allegiance to a Whiggish version of the presidency, Cleveland's aggressive insistence on presidential independence led him to exercise increasing control of the executive branch and then to seek influence over Congress and national legislation. Quick to denounce governmental paternalism and the centralization of political power, Cleveland nevertheless expanded the authority of the national government as he revised federal land and Indian policies in the West and ordered the army to Chicago during the 1894 Pullman strike. For all his fears of constitutional innovation, he was neither a champion of big business nor unaware of the problems posed by the post-Civil War economic revolution. He signed the Interstate commerce Act, warned against the growing power of industrial combination, advocated voluntary federal arbitration of labor-management disputes, and fought the monopolization of western lands by railroad an timber corporations. Welch places Cleveland's battles on behalf of tariff revision, civil service reform, and the gold standard within the context of the conundrum of a strong president who usually failed to gain the cooperation of Congress or the Democratic party. Cleveland reinvigorated the American presidency and reestablished an equilibrium between the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, but by his obdurate enmity to the silverites and the "agrarian radicals," he helped assure the division and defeat of his party in the election of 1896. Welch demonstrates that Cleveland's achievements and failures as a political leader were attributable to an authoritarian temperament that saw compromise as surrender. Two chapters of the book are devoted to Cleveland's diplomacy, focusing especially on his response to Hawaiian and Cuban revolutions and the boundary dispute between Venezuela and Great Britain. Welch takes issue with the currently popular thesis that U.S. diplomacy in the last decade of the nineteenth century displayed a concerted governmental effort to solve domestic economic problems by expanding foreign markets in East Asia and Latin America. In addition to providing insights into the character of one of our more interesting presidents, this reassessment of Grover Cleveland's historical legacy shows clearly that the Cleveland years served as the essential preface to the development of a modern presidency and to the identification for executive power.

Protective tariffs were part of American life long before the era of NAFTA and GATT. In the late nineteenth century, the "tariff question" was one of the most controversial issues of the day. As Joanne Reitano shows in this far-reaching study, the ensuing debate was anything but an empty exercise in political rhetoric occupying only politicians and lobbyists. The tariff was of central concern to a broad cross section of people because of its perceived relationship to immediate economic problems, such as wages, prices, and trusts. In fact, it became a means for many Americans to wrestle with the implications of the country's rapid growth and the impact of industrial capitalism on American life. Reitano focuses on the election year of 1888, when the tariff was adopted as a cause célèbre by President Grover Cleveland, Congress, the two major parties, and the press. At the heart of the debate was the Mills Bill for tariff reduction. Although the bill failed to pass, Reitano finds in the rancorous public debate a barometer of changes in the American mind in the Gilded Age. She carefully blends intellectual, political, economic, and social issues through analyses of the Congressional Record, press coverage of the debate, academic and polemical literature, political cartoons, and the presidential campaign. Ultimately, Reitano contends that ideas about political economy have always been central to the American mind. They were so in the Gilded Age as they are today.