The President Is a Sick Man

by Matthew Algeo

  Cleveland was also instrumental in the construction of a new sewer system that diverted waste from the Erie Canal. This put an end to Buffalo’s unappealing stench and dramatically improved public health.

  The demands of his new office proved so unrelenting that Grover was finally forced to curb his partying. To the dismay of his friends on Canal Street, he was seen less and less.

  In May 1882, Charles W. McCune, the editor of the Buffalo Courier, told a meeting of the Democratic State Committee that Grover Cleveland would make a fine candidate for governor. In an editorial the following month, the Buffalo Sunday Times said the same thing. By August, Cleveland had suddenly emerged as one of the leading contenders for the nomination.

  Again, the stars were with him. At the nominating convention, two Democratic factions were deadlocked. Backed by a third, reformist wing of the party, Cleveland emerged as the compromise candidate and was nominated on the third ballot. The Republicans, meanwhile, nominated a typical machine politician. In frustration, Republicans who favored reform flocked to Cleveland.

  On November 7, 1882, Cleveland was elected governor of New York with 58 percent of the vote. His star was rising so rapidly that even Cleveland himself could hardly believe it. In a letter written to his brother William on the night he was elected, Grover sounds as if he wondered what he’d gotten himself into: “The thought that has troubled me is, Can I perform my duties, and in such a manner as to do some good to the people of the state? I know there is room for it. ... I know that I am honest and sincere in the desire to do well, but the question is whether I know enough to accomplish what I desire.”

  In the same letter, Grover also wrote, “I shall have no idea of reelection or any higher political preferment in my head, but be very thankful and happy if I can well serve one term as the people’s governor.”

  In Albany, the veto mayor became the veto governor. He vetoed a bill that would have lowered fares on New York City’s elevated railroad from ten cents to five cents. Understandably, the bill had broad popular support, but Cleveland believed it to be patently unconstitutional. The state and the railroad had entered into a contract that clearly permitted the railroad to set fares. The night he vetoed the bill, Cleveland went to bed believing that when he woke up the next morning he would be “the most unpopular man in the state of New York.” Instead, the veto was hailed as an act of uncompromising political courage.

  He was, fundamentally, a reformer. In challenging the spoils system, he took on Tammany Hall, the powerful New York City political machine. Pledging to “work for the interests of the people of the state, regardless of party or anything else,” he insisted on hiring only the most qualified applicants for state government jobs. For superintendent of public works, he appointed a professional engineer, not a politician. For superintendent of insurance—a plum political position—Cleveland promoted the assistant superintendent instead of appointing a politician. After one round of appointments was announced, a Tammany official complained, “Out of all the three hundred places . . . Tammany was not guaranteed so much as a night watchman at Castle Garden.” (Castle Garden was New York City’s immigration center before Ellis Island.)

  Governor Cleveland also forged an unlikely alliance with an up-and-coming Republican lawmaker named Theodore Roosevelt. At the time Roosevelt was twenty-three, his boyish face partly obscured by the massive sideburns that were then fashionable. When Roosevelt managed to push a civil service reform bill through the legislature, Cleveland was happy to sign it.

  Grover was never afraid to confront the powerful, a quality that endeared him to voters. It was said he was loved for the enemies he made. When he refused to appoint to his staff a friend of Charles A. Dana, the influential publisher of the New York Sun, Dana was enraged. It was a slight that Dana would never forget, and it made him Cleveland’s lifelong enemy.

  Shortly after arriving in Albany, Cleveland hired Daniel S. Lamont as his private secretary. Lamont was a twenty-eight-year-old reporter for the Albany Argus. He’d met Cleveland during the gubernatorial campaign, and the two men hit it off immediately. “Lamont is a wonderful man,” Cleveland once told a friend. “I never saw his like. He has no friends to gratify and no enemies to punish.” Lamont, one reporter noted, was “discreet, industrious, and loyal . . . and capable of quite as hard work as Mr. Cleveland himself.” Although Lamont was fourteen years younger than Cleveland, he would become one of his closest friends since Oscar Folsom. Lamont’s vast knowledge of New York state politics was invaluable to the inexperienced governor, who had come to Albany a babe in the Empire State’s political woods. In gratitude, Cleveland appointed Lamont an honorary colonel in the New York National Guard, and thereafter the former newspaperman would be known as Colonel Lamont—though Grover still called him Dan. For the rest of Cleveland’s political career, Lamont would serve as his right-hand man, often acting as his press secretary and spokesman in the days before such positions were formalized.

  Dan Lamont was a twenty-eight-year-old reporter for an Albany newspaper when Grover Cleveland hired him to be his private secretary. The two men became close friends, and Lamont would become Cleveland’s most trusted adviser. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  The workload in Albany was crushing. On most nights, Cleveland and Lamont would work in the governor’s office until midnight or later, when Cleveland would customarily announce, “Well, I guess we’ll quit and call it half a day.” The grueling schedule did not escape the notice of Albany residents, who were not accustomed to seeing governors burn the midnight oil. It worried them. “Plainly he is a man who is not taking enough exercise,” the Albany Evening Journal wrote three months into Cleveland’s term. “There was not a night last week that he departed from the new Capitol before one a.m. Such work is killing work.” Even Cleveland knew he was working too hard. “My head a good deal of the time doesn’t feel right,” he confessed to a friend in April.

  There was, of course, even less time for carousing than when he was mayor of Buffalo. Besides, he was now in a strange town with few friends. His free time was spent mostly at the governor’s mansion—the first house Cleveland lived in as an adult. He installed a pool table but otherwise made no major alterations. Still, it was impossible for him to curb his vices entirely. He continued to smoke cigars and enjoy occasional beers. And on Sunday afternoons he often played poker with a twenty-five-cent limit. “My father used to say that it was wicked to go fishing on Sunday,” he would say, “but he never said anything about draw-poker.”

  Grover Cleveland’s reputation began to extend beyond the borders of New York State, and in the spring of 1884, just over a year after becoming governor, his name was being mentioned as a possible Democratic presidential candidate. Publicly, Cleveland professed no interest in the office. Privately, however, he began to marshal support for a bid. Clearly he had reconsidered the pledge he had made to his brother the night he was elected governor.

  Yet again, the stars were with Grover Cleveland.

  After James Garfield was assassinated, Chester Arthur became president. Arthur had been a notorious spoilsman, but as president he did a one-eighty and championed civil service reform. This infuriated Republican Party bosses, and instead of nominating Arthur for a full term in 1884, the Republicans chose James G. Blaine of Maine. It was a poor choice (though, had Arthur been nominated, he would not have survived another term anyway). Blaine, a former House speaker, senator, and secretary of state, was far from squeaky clean. Eight years earlier, he had been accused of accepting $100,000 from a railroad in exchange for favorable legislation.

  When the Democrats convened a month after the Republicans, they were determined to nominate a reform-minded candidate to oppose Blaine. Cleveland, with his unimpeachable reputation and winning track record, was nominated overwhelmingly on just the second ballot.

  Just ten days later, on July 21, 1884, the Buffalo Telegraph published an account of the Maria Halpin affair under the headline “A Terrible Tale; A Dark Chapter in a Public Man�
��s History.”

  “A child was born out of wedlock,” the story began. “Now ten years of age, this sturdy lad is named Oscar Folsom Cleveland. He and his mother have been supported in part by our ex-mayor, who now aspires to the White House. Astute readers may put the facts together and draw their own conclusions.” The story was written not by a reporter but by George Ball, a Baptist minister in Buffalo and longtime thorn in Cleveland’s side. Ball’s righteous account was extravagantly exaggerated. He accused Cleveland of abusing Maria and neglecting the child. Grover’s Buffalo apartment was, according to Ball, a “harem.” The shocking story was reprinted in papers from coast to coast.

  Cleveland’s response to this bombshell was legendary: “Whatever you do,” he wired his friends in Buffalo, “tell the truth.” He admitted to the affair but denied abusing or neglecting either mother or child. His honesty won him more support than his indiscretion had cost him. “After the preliminary offense,” one minister declared, “his conduct was singularly honorable.” Cleveland’s candor was commendable—and shrewd. He was already renowned as an ethical and hardworking governor who rooted out corruption and waste, and his handling of the Halpin affair cemented his reputation for honesty. He’d turned a potentially crippling scandal into a demonstration of integrity.

  But the episode embittered Grover. He felt betrayed by his adopted hometown. When a friend invited him to Buffalo later that year, Grover declined. “I would never go there again if I could avoid it,” he wrote.

  The incident also instilled in him a fundamental hostility toward the press.

  The 1884 presidential campaign still stands as one of the closest— and ugliest—ever. The candidates weren’t very far apart on the issues, so the campaign devolved into mudslinging and character assassination. The Democrats called Blaine a liar and taunted him mercilessly with a chant:

  Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine

  The continental liar from the state of Maine

  For their part, the Republicans portrayed Cleveland as a womanizing drunkard. Of course they also made much of the Halpin affair, even commissioning a mocking song called “Ma! Ma! Where’s My Pa?”

  Grover Cleveland in 1888. Grover’s weight would eventually approach three hundred pounds, making him quite literally the biggest political figure of his generation. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  Ma! Ma! Where is my pa?

  Up in the White House, darling

  Making the laws, working the cause

  Up in the White House, dear

  Some of the bitterest attacks on Cleveland came from Charles Dana, the New York Sun editor whom Cleveland had alienated by refusing to hire his friend. Dana called Cleveland “a coarse debauchee who would bring his harlots with him to Washington and hire lodgings for them convenient to the White House.” He also railed against Cleveland’s “plodding mind, limited knowledge, and narrow capacities.” It was Dana who sarcastically labeled Cleveland’s reformist Republican supporters mugwumps, appropriating an old Algonquian word supposedly meaning “war leader.” To Dana’s consternation, the mugwumps embraced the label as a badge of honor.

  The election came down to New York, the biggest electoral plum at the time. The candidate who won that state’s thirty-six electoral votes would win the presidency. Since it was his home state, Cleveland should have had an advantage, but in the previous seven presidential elections the state had gone Democratic just twice: 1868 and 1876.

  On October 29, 1884—just five days before the election—a Presbyterian minister introducing Blaine at an event in New York City condemned the Democrats as the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion”—drunk, Catholic, and disloyal. That single disparaging remark swung the Catholic vote in New York to Cleveland. That, coupled with the support of the mugwumps, helped Cleveland carry the state by 1,047 votes—out of 1.1 million cast. Nationwide, Cleveland won the popular vote by just 0.7 percent.

  The margin was razor thin, but Grover Cleveland had ended the Republican Party’s stranglehold on the White House. Jubilant Democrats came up with a new chant:

  Hurrah for Maria

  Hurrah for the kid

  We voted for Grover

  And we’re damn glad we did

  On March 4, 1885, Stephen Grover Cleveland became the first Democrat to assume the presidency in twenty-eight years. He also became just the second bachelor president, after James Buchanan. The first time he had ever stepped foot in Washington was the day before.

  3

  THE DREAD DISEASE

  ON JUNE 2, 1884, at his summer home in Long Branch, New Jersey, Ulysses S. Grant bit into a peach and suddenly felt a sharp pain in his throat, a pain so intense it made him cry out. The retired general and former president, who had survived close calls in two wars, was nearly felled by a piece of fruit. As the summer progressed, the pain became more acute, especially when Grant swallowed, but it wasn’t until November that Grant, by then having returned to his home in New York City, finally consented to an examination. He went to see Dr. John Hancock Douglas, who was one of the country’s leading throat specialists. Douglas detected a small, scaly growth at the base of Grant’s tongue.

  “Is it cancer?” Grant bluntly asked the doctor.

  “General,” Douglas answered, “the disease is serious, epithelial in character, and sometimes capable of being cured.”

  In other words, yes.

  Today, Grant would be diagnosed with a squamous cell carcinoma— the same type of cancer that Grover Cleveland would be diagnosed with nine years later.

  In the nineteenth century, no diagnosis was as feared as cancer. It was tantamount to a death sentence. The very word was not spoken in polite company. It was most commonly referred to as “the dread disease” or simply “the disease.” Even Dr. Douglas admitted he “avoided the use of the word ‘cancer’” in front of Grant.

  The phobia was well founded. Cancer had confounded doctors since the fifth century BC, when Hippocrates advised, “It is better not to apply treatment in cases of occult [internal] cancer; for if treated, the patients die quickly; but if not treated, they hold out for a long time.” Indeed, the treatments were as fearsome, and nearly as fatal, as the disease. A Viennese doctor named Theodor Billroth was one of the nineteenth century’s most skilled surgeons. He operated on 170 cancer patients between 1867 and 1876. Eight survived longer than three years—a survival rate of 4.7 percent. Inevitably, alternative remedies flourished. One of the most successful patent medicine peddlers in the United States was John D. Rockefeller’s father, William Rockefeller, whose calling card claimed he could cure “all cases of cancer.” He sold a liquid potion for twenty-five dollars a bottle. Folk remedies abounded as well. One called for the hand of a dead man to be placed on the tumor. Another prescribed the head of a puppy, dried and powdered and mixed with honey, to be applied to the growth.

  Truth was, nobody knew what caused cancer or how to cure it. Some doctors believed it was contagious or hereditary. Others blamed luxurious living, melancholy blood, grief, anxiety, too much nourishing food, and very hot food or drink. In 1881, when a Boston medical journal offered a $1,000 prize for the best essay on the “Cure for a Malignant Disease,” it received exactly three entries. When the journal reprised the contest a year later, it received none. The journal blamed the “barrenness of American researchers.” Cancerphobia effectively stymied research. Medical schools and hospitals did not want to be associated with the disease. The first cancer hospital in the United States didn’t open until 1905 in Philadelphia. Today it’s known as the Fox Chase Cancer Center, but then it was called the American Oncologic Hospital, the word “cancer” being deemed still too alarming.

  Of cancer, the Philadelphia surgeon Samuel Gross glumly declared in the middle of the nineteenth century, “all we know, with any degree of certainty, is that we know nothing.”

  Some theories, however, were beginning to emerge. An eighteenth-century English doctor named Percivall Pott noticed that chimney sweeps seemed to get cancer of the scrotum i
n unusually high numbers. He blamed soot. In the mid-nineteenth century, cancers of the mouth and throat became more common. Some doctors attributed it to the increased use of cigars and chewing tobacco. Grant was a heavy smoker—he was known to consume as many as twenty cigars a day— and his doctor, John Hancock Douglas, believed that “smoking was the exciting cause” of Grant’s cancer. Still, the opinion was not universally shared. Grant’s dentist, Frank Abbott, believed the “constant irritation” from the “rough and ragged surfaces of a broken tooth” had caused the cancer in Grant’s mouth. “Tobacco probably had little or nothing to do with the origin of the tumor,” Abbott said.

  Much like AIDS a century later, the stigma attached to cancer was so deep and profound that people who had it were embarrassed or afraid to admit it, and Grant was no exception. He told no one outside his immediate family he had cancer. Even his closest friends were kept in the dark as to the true nature of his illness. When rumors about the general’s health began to circulate in January 1885, his physicians flatly denied Grant had cancer, instead blaming his poor health on “a bothersome tooth.” “Gen. Grant has not cancer of the tongue,” Dr. Douglas fibbed to reporters. “The difficulty is in his mouth, and it is of an epithelial character. The irritation has now been greatly relieved, and that is all I feel at liberty to say.” By then, however, Grant’s doctors already knew he had a “cancer of the malignant type that was sure to end fatally.” Surgery was deemed too risky. The cancer was too far advanced. By April it had spread to Grant’s throat, neck, and soft palate. There was nothing Grant’s doctors could do but try to ease his pain.This they did with frequent doses of cocaine. Grant was grateful for the relief, however temporary. “I have tried to study the function of the use of cocain[e],” he wrote. “The conclusion I have come to in my case is, taken properly, it gives a wonderful amount of relief from pain.”