Grover Cleveland
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50 free Grover Cleveland trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Grover Cleveland is the answer to one of the most famous presidential trivia questions: who served two non-consecutive terms? But there is a lot more to him than the 22-and-24 footnote. He was a Buffalo sheriff who personally hanged two men, a reforming mayor and governor who took on Tammany Hall, a bachelor president who married a 21-year-old in the Blue Room, and a hard-money Democrat who vetoed more bills in one term than all his predecessors combined. This quiz runs through the 1884 mudslinging ("Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?"), the Texas Seed Bill veto, the Dawes Act, the lost election of 1888, the comeback of 1892, the Panic of 1893, the Pullman Strike and the secret cancer operation performed on a friend's yacht off Long Island. It finishes with Princeton, a candy-bar legend and the $1,000 bill. Fifty sourced questions from easy to hard, each with an explanation that adds one more detail.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01As president in 1886, Cleveland presided over the dedication of which American landmark?
Statue of Liberty
Statue of Liberty. Cleveland dedicated France's gift on October 28, 1886, and as that morning's parade passed the Stock Exchange, traders threw ticker tape from the windows, starting a New York tradition.
Q 02Which two numbers does Cleveland hold in the presidential sequence?
22nd and 24th
22nd and 24th. Because a defeat split his two terms, he is counted as two presidents, so the U.S. Mint struck two different Cleveland dollar coins in 2012.
Q 03Cleveland made his career in New York, but in which state was he born?
New Jersey
New Jersey. He was born in the Presbyterian manse at Caldwell, but his minister father moved the family to upstate New York when the boy was four.
Q 04What was Cleveland's actual first name, which he dropped in adult life?
Stephen
Stephen. He was named Stephen Grover after the first pastor of the Caldwell church where his father preached.
Q 05Cleveland's early career was built in which city?
Buffalo
Buffalo. Heading west in 1855, he stopped there to see a relative, Lewis Allen, who gave him work and introduced him to the law firm where he trained.
Q 06How did Cleveland avoid serving in the Civil War under the 1863 Conscription Act?
He hired a substitute
He hired a substitute, as the draft law allowed, paying a Polish immigrant to serve in his place while he supported his mother and sisters; rivals later called him a slacker.
Q 07What duty did Cleveland perform personally as sheriff of Erie County?
Hanging two murderers
Hanging two murderers. Cleveland sprang the trap himself in 1872 and again in 1873, and in the 1884 campaign Republicans branded him a hangman for it.
Q 08Which Democratic machine opposed Cleveland's 1884 nomination?
Tammany Hall
Tammany Hall. The New York City machine fought his nomination for president in 1884 and lost, and defying it made his national name as a reformer.
Q 09As mayor, Cleveland made his name vetoing a padded contract for what?
Street cleaning
Street cleaning. Cleveland's veto of the padded contract made the new mayor a reform hero, and within a year Democrats had put him up for governor of New York.
Q 10Which future president worked with Governor Cleveland as assembly minority leader?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt. The young Republican led the assembly minority in 1883, yet he teamed up with the Democratic governor on reform bills that first won Cleveland national notice.
Q 11As governor, Cleveland vetoed a bill cutting fares on whose elevated trains?
Jay Gould's
Jay Gould's. The five-cent fare bill was popular because the financier was widely hated, but Cleveland held that the state had to honour its contract with him.
Q 12Reform Republicans who backed Cleveland in 1884 were known by what name?
Mugwumps
Mugwumps. Led by men such as Carl Schurz, they bolted because they judged their own party's nominee corrupt and saw Cleveland as an honest reformer.
Q 13Whom did Cleveland narrowly defeat in the 1884 presidential election?
James G. Blaine
Democrats chanted "Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of Maine".
Q 21Hundreds of Cleveland's 414 first-term vetoes killed bills for what?
Veterans' pensions
Veterans' pensions. He judged hundreds of the private Civil War claims fraudulent, and in four years vetoed about twice as many bills as all earlier presidents combined.
Q 22In 1887 Cleveland vetoed seed aid for drought-hit farmers in which state?
Texas
Texas. A drought had ruined crops there, but Cleveland's veto message insisted that "though the people support the government, the government should not support the people."
Q 23Cleveland vetoed 584 bills over his two terms, a record that stood until which later president?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Q 14What was Cleveland's 1884 campaign slogan?
"A public office is a public trust"
"A public office is a public trust" compressed a principle Cleveland first voiced when running for mayor, and his clean record made it the Democrats' strongest card in 1884.
Q 15What did Republicans chant at rallies in 1884 about Cleveland's alleged child?
"Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?"
"Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?" mocked his admission that the child might be his. After he won, Democrats supplied the answer: "Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!"
Q 16Which Republican slur against the Democrats backfired and helped Cleveland carry New York in 1884?
"Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion"
"Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" was a minister's phrase at a rally for the Republican nominee, and Democrats made sure Irish Catholic voters heard it in the campaign's last days.
Q 17By about how many votes did Cleveland carry New York, and with it the presidency, in 1884?
About 1,200
About 1,200, out of more than a million cast. Had New York gone the other way, its electoral votes would have made his Republican opponent president instead.
Q 18What happened to Thomas Hendricks, Cleveland's first vice president, eight months into the term?
He died in office
He died in office, in November 1885, and the vice presidency then sat empty for more than three years, until the next inauguration.
Q 19Which 1887 act signed by Cleveland made railroads the first federally regulated industry?
Interstate Commerce Act
Interstate Commerce Act. It answered years of anger at railroads that gave big shippers rebates, banning the practice and setting up a commission to police the lines.
Q 20Which act signed by Cleveland broke Native American tribal lands into allotments?
Dawes Act
Dawes Act. Cleveland believed private plots would lift Native Americans out of poverty; instead, by 1934 the tribes had lost about two-thirds of the land they held when he signed it.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who vetoed 635 bills in twelve years. Cleveland, who saw his job as a watchdog over Congress rather than a lawmaker, had rejected 584 in eight.
Q 24Cleveland was the second president to marry in office and the only one to marry where?
In the White House
In the White House. The small ceremony took place in the Blue Room in June 1886, ending 15 months in which the bachelor president's sister had served as his hostess.
Q 25Who became First Lady at 21 by marrying President Cleveland in 1886?
Frances Folsom
Frances Folsom. Cleveland had known her all her life: as a girl she called him "Uncle Cleve", and he began quietly courting her after she visited the White House in 1885.
Q 26Whose daughter did Cleveland marry?
His law partner
His law partner, who had died in a carriage accident when she was eleven. Cleveland then administered the estate and helped oversee her upbringing.
Q 27Which candy bar did its maker claim was named for Cleveland's daughter?
Baby Ruth
Baby Ruth. That was the Curtiss Candy Company's account of its 1921 bar, but Ruth Cleveland had died 17 years earlier and Babe Ruth was then baseball's biggest star, so sceptics have long doubted it.
Q 28Cleveland's granddaughter, the philosopher Philippa Foot, introduced which thought experiment?
Trolley problem
Trolley problem. Foot, the child of Cleveland's daughter Esther, posed it in a 1967 paper on abortion to test when harming one person to spare five can be justified.
Q 29Cleveland's chief justice oversaw which ruling?
Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson: Melville Fuller, Cleveland's 1888 choice, joined the 1896 majority that upheld "separate but equal" rail cars, a doctrine the Court threw out unanimously in 1954.
Q 30In 1888 Cleveland won the popular vote but lost the presidency to whom?
Benjamin Harrison
Benjamin Harrison. Cleveland led the nationwide count by less than one percentage point but lost his own state of New York, and with it the Electoral College.