How Grover Cleveland ended up
on the Buffalo State board
Legal and public service contacts led to political triumphs
of 1880s
By Sarah Slavin
The year 1870 marked the beginning of what Grover
Cleveland's Pulitzer prize-winning biographer Allan Nevins has called "the quietest
decade in Cleveland's life." Perhaps it was a case of still waters running deep,
for throughout the decade Cleveland was assiduously dipping his paddle in the stream
of political opportunity. Yet, viewed from the shore, the ìman of destiny,î as local
sage Cyramus Chapin Bristol -- Buffalo's first-born white male citizen -- called
Cleveland, must have seemed small.
Nevins has said law filled ìnearly his entire horizon," while Cleveland performed
no ìpublic service.ì At least Nevins found little evidence of Cleveland sitting on
various worthy-cause boards. Nevins was reasonably but not entirely correct about
the law, but inaccurate about Cleveland's public service. At the very beginning
of the decade, Cleveland was appointed in 1870 to the first Board of Managers
of the State Normal School at Buffalo. The State Normal School opened on September
13, 1871. It since has become Buffalo State College. Cleveland also served a single,
but lucrative, term as County Sheriff, a political plum to be sure.
The Normal School Movement
The road to a system of state teacher's colleges in New York State began between
the years 1839 and 1860. The stimulation after 1839 of the Normal School Movement,
as it was called, was due to dissatisfaction with the overly egalitarian and uncoordinated
way a person could become a teacher.
The Normal School Movement advocated state-run teachers' training. The maxim of the
Movement came from Prussia, a worldwide leader in teacher training, ìAs goes the
school, so goes the student.î An adequate teacher's education would focus not only
on substantive materials but also on teaching methods. The other world leader in
teacher training was France; from its experience with l'ecole normale came the U.S.
movement's name.
Normal schools first appeared in Massachusetts in 1838 and 1839. New York also played
an important part in the movement.
Despite the period's notably laissez faire attitudes -- That Government Is Best Which
Governs Least -- the normal school movement stressed government involvement in the
educational process, among other things, to professionalize the subject matter of
teacher training.
Teachers' training advocates threatened the teaching establishment, then dominated
by church-based educators. Predictably, the establishment stressed individualism
and the normal school movement's abrogation of it.
The movement prevailed anyway. The New York teaching establishment agreed to train
teachers but through private academies. In 1834, academies at Potsdam and Canandaigua
became state-subsidized to give teachers certain educational opportunities. This
legislative act marked two firsts: provision of money for training teachers and involving
private institutions to do this public service.
The State Board of Regents did the politic thing and named eight academies, one in
each state senatorial district, for development. By 1841 there existed 16 academies
in New York State with new teacher training divisions funded by state monies. They
failed, though, when it came to actually training teachers. The state monies were
distributed in the manner of categorical grants, spent variously and not accounted
for. The students continued to receive a traditional classic education and did not
linger long . Further, they did not continue in education but moved on, e.g., to
practice law.
Cleveland, who worked as an untrained teacher assistant to his older brother William
at the state-maintained New York Institute for the Blind in New York City from 1853
to 1854, found it bleak. He taught the three R's and geography, receiving most of
his own literary education in the process. One of Cleveland's fellow teachers later
reported that he already was considering the study of law while teaching at the institute.
Several U.S. presidents have taught on the elementary or secondary level, including
Fillmore and Cleveland. In their inclination to leave the teaching field for law,
they followed the experience of many teachers of the times.
With failure of the academies to train teachers properly came the normal schools.
The first state normal school was founded in Albany in 1844. Beginning in 1860, they
began to attract increasingly favorable public opinion. It generally was agreed that
training produced the best teachers. In 1866-1867, Buffalo qualified to bid for the
location of a state normal school.
Jesse Ketchum donates land for a State Normal School at Buffalo
On July 9, 1866, a City Council Standing Committee on Schools reported favorably, but probably invisibly, a proposal by teacher education school advocate Jesse Ketchum, Esq., to donate to Buffalo land sided by York, Jersey, Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets. (Today, Thirteenth Street is known as Normal Avenue, while a Ketchum Street runs between Jersey and York.)
In exchange, on the half lot fronting on Jersey, the City would build a normal school as well as contribute $300 per annum for books and prizes to benefit the educational cause. The provision for books and prizes was included in the deed of trust, which stated:
ìThe medals and other prizes are intended as incentives to diligence and study, correct deportment and good behavior..., to promote a faithful application to prescribe studies, a cheerful obedience to all the rules and regulations of the school, a respectful demeanor towards the teachers, a strict attention to proprieties..., and a supreme regard for whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good reportî
On November 1, the Erie County Board of Supervisors approved the normal school and
appointed a building committee. On November 12, Ketchum executed a deed in return
for which the City executed a bond. The City Council appointed a committee to bid
in Albany for a state normal school at Buffalo.
Despite having established the first property tax-based free public school system
in the state and employing more teachers than any other city in the state except
New York, Buffalo, a city of nearly 80,000 people, the state's third largest, did
not prevail. Its bid failed on November 20. The state board recommended that a special
law be passed to authorize a Buffalo normal school.
On May 4, 1867, three commissioners were appointed to serve, in effect, as a building
committee. The commissioners included Oliver G. Steele, Esq., the former school superintendent
who had served on the county-appointed building committee, and the Reverend Dr. A.T.
Chester, who had chaired that committee. Replacing another member of the original
building committee was Dennis Bowen, Esq.
Dennis Bowen brings Cleveland aboard
Dennis Bowen was Cleveland's mentor.. Between 1860 and 1870, Bowen had compiled the
largest personal clientele of any Buffalo lawyer. Bowen avoided publicity and mastered
details, traits also characterizing Cleveland all his professional life. The honesty
of the reform-minded Bowen preceded him as Cleveland's dogged integrity did him.
The two men had a great deal in common; and their mutuality contributed to an orderliness
that was both predictable and secure.
On September 16, 1870 -- 125 years ago last fall -- the State Superintendent of Public
Instruction appointed the normal school's first local Board of Managers, also known
as the Board of Trustees. Exercising joint control with the state superintendent,
the board had nine members, including the Honorable Grover Cleveland. Presumably
Bowen's interest in Cleveland and Cleveland's still growing public visibility combined
to make him appointable.
Cleveland's legal apprenticeship also stood him in good stead. In the middle years
on the nineteenth century, many states held that a good legal education amounted
to nothing more than mastering a craft and that such mastery could properly be obtained
through an apprenticeship; that is, by entering a practitioner's office to read law,
copy legal documents by hand, and perform small services for the law office The new
lawyer's knowledge, was thus limited. There was no theory of the case, no paper chase
of legal principles.
This was to be Cleveland's path. Cleveland began his legal (and political) education
in the civil law firm of Henry W. Rogers, Dennis Bowen and Sherman S. Rogers in 1855.
All three partners were reform Democrats. Ironically, Cleveland's uncle Lewis Allen,
who had secured him the position,was a Republican.
During his apprenticeship Cleveland was left to shift for himself. He was pointed
to a table in a corner, the legend goes, upon which was slapped a copy of Blackstone's
Commentaries, a codification of the English common law, and instructed: ìThat's where
they all begin.î Cleveland mentioned to his uncle that no one told him anything.
So informed, the elder Rogers pronounced, ìIf the boy has brains he'll find out for
himself without anyone telling him.î
It developed that the boy had brains enough.
It seems fair to conclude that Cleveland's appointment to the Board of Managers was
both partisan and nongratuitous. As a law, order, and property man, Cleveland had
the right answers on call. Welch has written that ìhe prided himself on being a practical
man who met the issues and problems as they arose.î
Not only did he appreciate fiscal management and integrity, he also knew firsthand
the difficulties of the untrained teacher and the frustration of self-training
for the Bar. As an attorney he appreciated method, the centerpiece of teacher
training. He recognized the limits of his own legal training as a reader and
copyist and, as a result, the limitations of his legal career. And, he understood
that ephemeral quality, the common good.
The Normal School Opens
On September 13, 1871, the normal school opened with 86 students, 87% of them
female. It offered a two year program. By then, teaching had become a woman's profession.
The School of Practice included 195 students, 20 allotted to each of the ten grades
in the public schools .
The formal opening of the normal school came on October 25, 1871. In 1873 the school's
first class graduated, thoroughly informed on instruction in the three R's, about
which they themselves on admission probably were not all too clear. Each class member
had received one year of professional studies as well.
Today all that remains on a campus removed from its original site, to remind us that
Grover Cleveland served, is the Buffalo State College administration building, Cleveland
Hall.