Frances Folsom Cleveland

Cleveland, Frances Folsom (21 July 1864-29 Oct. 1947), wife of Grover Cleveland, was born in Buffalo, New York, the daughter of Oscar Folsom, an attorney, and Emma Harmon. Frances Folsom knew Grover Cleveland as her father's law partner. When Oscar Folsom died in an accident in 1875, his law partner took over management of his estate and became in effect, although not in fact, Frances Folsom's guardian. Twenty-seven years her senior, he played the part of doting uncle to "Frankie" while piling up remarkable political victories, rising from mayor of Buffalo to governor of the state.

Frances Folsom enrolled at Wells College in 1882 and graduated three years later, celebrating her accomplishment with a tour of Europe from September 1885 to May 1886. Before setting off on that journey with her mother, she had visited the White House, then occupied by bachelor president Grover Cleveland, and had accepted his marriage proposal. Wedding plans remained secret, however, and journalists continued to speculate on various romantic interests of the president. Reports linked him with the widow Emma Folsom and with other women.

On 2 June 1886, in the only White House wedding of an incumbent chief executive, Frances Folsom and Grover Cleveland were married. The bride's grandfather, whose home might have served for the nuptials, had recently died, and the Folsoms did not have access to another home offering adequate security and space. The ceremony occurred in the Blue Room in the presence of about thirty relatives and cabinet members. The president had penned the invitations himself.

Just short of her twenty-second birthday at the time of the wedding, Frances Cleveland was the youngest woman to become first lady, at least as wife of the president (female relatives had sometimes substituted for ailing wives of presidents at a younger age). In addition to her youth, she brought a remarkably attractive personality to her position, and she became enormously popular. American women copied her hairstyle, adopted her nickname, and emulated her in various other ways. Advertisers seized on her fame by linking her with their products until one irate congressman introduced legislation (never passed) that would have made it illegal to use images of female relatives of political leaders in advertisements.

His young, popular bride helped improve the reputation of the president, who had, at the time of the 1882 election, been linked publicly with a Buffalo woman whose child he admitted supporting. Rumors of his boorishness continued, however, and in the 1888 election Frances Cleveland made public a letter she had sent in reply to one asserting that the president mistreated her: "I can wish the women of our country no greater blessing than that their homes and lives may be as happy and their husbands may be as kind, attentive, considerate and affectionate as mine." Notwithstanding that disclaimer, Grover Cleveland failed to win reelection (he captured the popular vote but did not win in the electoral college). As Frances Cleveland prepared to vacate the White House, she predicted correctly that she would return four years later.

During the interim between the two terms, the Clevelands lived in New York City, where their first daughter was born in October 1891. Soon after they returned to the White House in 1893, a second daughter was born, the only child of a president to be born in the mansion.

During the summer of 1893, when her husband was operated on for cancer of the jaw, Frances Cleveland participated in the ruse that kept the surgery a secret from the public. Because of an already bad economic climate, the president and his advisers feared that news of his illness might adversely affect business, so he arranged for the operation to be performed in secrecy on a private yacht near New York City. When he did not arrive, as scheduled, at the Clevelands' summer home in Massachusetts, reporters approached his wife for some news of his whereabouts and threatened to write articles calling attention to his disappearance. She reassured them that no mystery was involved and requested that they write nothing. As a result, the details of the surgery were not generally known until 1917, long after the president had died of other causes.

At the end of Cleveland's second term in 1897, the family (now including three daughters) moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where two sons were later born. After her husband died in 1908, Frances Cleveland continued to live in Princeton with her children. In February 1913 she married Thomas Jex Preston, an archaeology professor who had quit the business world at age forty to enroll at Princeton where he earned first a bachelor's degree and then a doctorate. She thus became the first widow of a president to remarry.

Until her death, Frances Folsom Cleveland Preston retained much of the attention afforded presidents' widows. She was granted the franking privilege in 1909 and continued to use it after her second marriage, when she amended her name to read Frances F. Cleveland Preston. In 1936 Congress authorized an annual pension of $5,000 for her.

Active in many charitable organizations, Frances Cleveland Preston did volunteer work with several patriotic groups during World War I, served on the board of managers of the Woman's University Club, participated in the Needlework Guild of America (which collected clothing for distribution to the poor), and worked for the endowment fund of Wells College. After she died in Baltimore, where she had gone to help celebrate her son's fiftieth birthday, she was buried beside her first husband in Princeton, New Jersey.

Bibliography

No biography of Frances Cleveland exists, but several of her husband's biographers cover her White House years. See Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland (1932), and Robert McElroy, Grover Cleveland (2 vols., 1923). Several books on first ladies devote considerable space to her success in that role. See Betty Boyd Caroli, First Ladies (1987), and Carl Sferrazza Anthony, First Ladies, vol. 1 (1990). An obituary is in the New York Times, 30 Oct. 1947.

Betty Boyd Caroli

Citation:

Betty Boyd Caroli. "Cleveland, Frances Folsom";

http://www.anb.org/articles/05/05-00899.html;

American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

Access Date: Fri Aug 09 2013 13:32:05 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)

Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.