Descendants of three American Presidents will speak at a forum in Caldwell next month at a forum sponsored by the Grover Cleveland Birthplace Memorial Association to celebrate Grover Cleveland Birthday Week.
An event will be held at the Grover Cleveland Middle School on Saturday, March 21, at 1:00 PM, which will feature George Cleveland, the grandson of the only U.S. President to be born in New Jersey, along with Ulysses Grant Dietz, the great-great—great grandson of President Ulysses Grant, and James A. (Jay) Garfield III, whose great-great-grandfather was the 20th President.
Cleveland, a New Hampshire resident, has been a longtime supporter of the Cleveland association. His father, Richard Cleveland, was born in Princeton in 1897, seven months after his 60-year-old father completed his second term in the White House. Richard Cleveland was 54 when his son, George, was born. As an attorney, he represented Time senior editor Whittaker Chambers during the Alger Hiss espionage case.
Dietz, who is retired as a decorative arts curator at the Newark Museum, is the great-grandson of Grant’s oldest son, Frederick, a former U.S. Minister (now called Ambassador) to Austria-Hungary during the administrations of President Benjamin Harrison and Cleveland. A retired U.S. Army brigadier general, he ran for office once: an unsuccessful bid for Secretary of State in New York. His grandfather was Ulysses S. Grant III, a White House aide to President Theodore Roosevelt and the son-in-law of Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, Elihu Root. Dietz’s late mother, Julia, was Grant’s last-living great-grandchild.
Garfield is the head athletic trainer and a professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. His great-grandfather, who was fifteen when he witnessed his father’s assassination, served as U.S. Secretary of the Interior in President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration; in 1910, he was a candidate for the Republican nomination for governor of Ohio, but withdrew after the party’s convention voted to support President William Howard Taft in the 1912 presidential election. The winner, Warren Harding, lost the gubernatorial race but a decade later won the presidency; Garfield was the Progressive Bull Moose Party candidate for governor in 1914.
Essex County Commissioner Carlos Pomares will also speak at the event, which has a $5 admission fee. For information, please contact GCBMA board member James Gardner at jfgklg83@gmail.com