The Clandestine Operations Performed on President Grover Cleveland and the Rationale for Surgical Secrecy

The 1893 operations to remove a maxillofacial tumor from President Grover Cleveland aboard a private yacht remained a secret until long after his unrelated death from heart disease. Many historical studies have suggested that Cleveland kept his health and surgical care confidential because of the fragility of the economy during the Panic of 1893. Although that observation is true, it does not fully address the underlying reason for why the public would react poorly to news about an operation on the president. The death of Ulysses S. Grant eight years prior unearthed the denial, stigma, and fear of cancer felt by many Americans. Despite revolutionary 19th century advances in anesthesia, pathology, and surgery, the social history of “cancerphobia” ran deep.

The Ordeal of Eugene Debs

The American panic of 1893 has its origins in the fiscal policy of the U.S. Congress. Within a year, the 1893 panic ushered in one of the most famous labor conflicts in American history. The American Railway Union's support for workers locked out of the Pullman Palace Car Company became a titanic general strike centered in Chicago. What began as international doubt about the dollar's convertibility into gold became by 1894 a test of Eugene Debs' new American Railway Union, then an abortive strike, then a collapse of the traditional two-party system. This story is often told differently by political scientists, labor historians, and scholars of socialism, the South, or the transition from the Gilded Age to the Progressive era. This chapter attempts to put some of those histories and historiographies together.