The President Is a Sick Man

by Matthew Algeo

  It wasn’t just a beat. It was one of the greatest scoops in the history of American journalism, and it is still the most detailed account of a medical procedure on a sitting president to be published without authorization.

  The story appeared on the front page of the Philadelphia Press on August 29, 1893—the day after the House voted to repeal the Silver Purchase Act. In an age when exaggeration and even fabrication were acceptable journalistic devices, Edwards’s account is notable for its absence of hyperbole. The prose is simple, restrained, sober—a little flowery sometimes, but never sensational or maudlin. Edwards forsook hysteria for accuracy.

  In spite of its importance, though, Edwards’s dispatch was not published underneath a banner headline. The bold, bellowing, page-wide headers that would come to epitomize yellow journalism were not yet in vogue in 1893. A few papers were experimenting with banners, usually to promote Sunday features or state editorial opinions. But the barriers that had long separated the eight narrow columns on every paper’s front page would not be fully breached until 1894, when New York papers began using banner headlines for news stories. Banners quickly became standard, reaching their apogee during the Spanish-American War, when some headlines were so big they were only four or five characters wide.

  But in 1893, newspapers were still adhering to the old “tombstone” style of stacking headlines within a single column over each story, so, at first glance, Edwards’s scoop appears no more dramatic than any other story on the front page. Upon closer inspection, though, its magnitude is obvious:

  THE PRESIDENT A VERY SICK MAN.

  An Operation Performed on Him on Mr. Benedict’s Yacht.

  PART OF THE JAW REMOVED.

  The story beneath these headlines takes up nearly three full columns on the front page. Edwards, writing under his usual penname of Holland, begins with a paragraph casting Cleveland in a sympathetic light before making his startling revelation:

  E. J. Edwards’s scoop about the secret operation on Grover Cleveland appeared on the front page of the Philadelphia Press on August 29, 1893. FREE LIBRARY OF PHILADELPHIA

  NEW YORK, Aug. 28.—Mr. Cleveland returns to Washington some day this week if all goes well and there are unusual reasons why, when he is again in the Capital, he should receive most tender, considerate and gentle sympathy and support, not only from those who are in public life, but also from the people themselves. He takes back to Washington a burden and a dread which he might very justly regard of greater moment than the financial situation which he has requested Congress instantly to ameliorate.

  It is useless longer to conceal the fact that Mr. Cleveland is a sick man, perhaps a very sick man, and that the physicians have fear that mortal disease is lurking in his system, notwithstanding heroic efforts of surgery to remove it during the Summer. . . . The news which is here reported for the first time has been received from those whose sources of information are so accurate as to justify, even to compel, its publication.

  Edwards describes Cleveland’s ailment obliquely. Adhering to Gilded Age convention, he tiptoes around the word “cancer,” instead referring to the disease as “that dread and mysterious enemy which physicians scarcely dare to name.” He also writes that the disease might be “another form of the same disease which brought General Grant, with beautiful pathos, to his deathbed.” The comparison to Grant, whose slow and painful death eight years before was still vivid in the public memory, must have perturbed Cleveland deeply.

  Edwards also explains why Cleveland wanted to keep the operation secret: to keep the country from being “alarmed” and to keep his family from being “overwhelmed by anxiety and suspense.” Like many others, Edwards was apparently under the misapprehension that Grover had concealed his condition even from his wife.

  The operation itself is described only briefly:

  When the time came the President of the United States submitted himself to the surgeon as calmly, as gently, and as willingly as though he were merely lying down for brief slumber. . . . The operation did not require very long, but it entailed the cutting away of a considerable part of the upper jaw bone upon one side, the instrument boring through the bone and tissue as far as the orbital plate.

  Throughout the story, Edwards makes every effort to portray the president as honorable, even heroic, at one point describing him as “tormented by pain.” He is also careful to reassure readers that the president is no longer in any immediate danger. “The wound seemed to heal easily, naturally, and that of itself furnishes considerable hope that the disease . . . may after all not be malignant as was feared, but of that nature which the physicians call benign.” His tone is respectful—almost reverential. Although Edwards was a Republican, he clearly admired Cleveland, whom he once called “a man of extraordinary personal force.” It’s virtually certain that the two men had met at some point, since Edwards covered the 1884 presidential campaign for the Sun and then served as the paper’s Washington correspondent for the first two years of Cleveland’s first term.

  In the article, Edwards also addresses the assertion that the president had merely had some dental work performed on the Oneida, and he anticipates the denials that will inevitably issue from the Executive Mansion:

  The physicians believe that they have removed all of the diseased tissue and bone. . . . Of course in doing this teeth were extracted, so that the physicians were truthful when they afterward said that the President had had some teeth pulled out while he was on Mr. Benedict’s yacht. They were also well within the rules of professional diplomacy when they denied that any other operation than that of ordinary gentle surgery had been performed, and they now defend these statements and are quite likely publicly to insist that they said all that was necessary to say, or that the operation justified when they announced that Mr. Cleveland had merely had some teeth extracted.

  Edwards’s story was certainly spectacular, but, since it was based almost exclusively on Hasbrouck’s recollection of events, it was not complete. Of the six doctors present at the operation, Edwards identifies just two in his article: Hasbrouck and Bryant. He also suggests that Cleveland was given some kind of injection the night before the operation to help him sleep better—but W. W. Keen later asserted that the president “passed a good night, sleeping well without any sleeping medicine.” And Edwards mentions nothing of the second, less serious operation on Cleveland, which Hasbrouck had not participated in and presumably had no knowledge of.

  Nonetheless, the report was, by any measure, an incredibly accurate account of what was supposed to be a secret medical procedure. And unlike the cancer rumors that had circulated shortly after the operation, Edwards’s report was clearly substantiated by an eyewitness. Even some of the drama’s principal figures were impressed with Edwards’s effort— though they could never admit that openly. Dan Lamont, who publicly denounced the report as “infamous,” later confided to Edwards that it was “the greatest news beat.” Dr. Keen was equally impressed, calling it “a great newspaper scoop.”

  Naturally, Edwards’s story was picked up by the wire services and transmitted to every major newspaper in the country. Many reprinted it verbatim. By the next day the story was on the front page of papers from coast to coast, often under hysterical headlines (“He Had a Cancer,” shouted the San Francisco Morning Call).

  In many papers the story appeared alongside reports on the House vote to repeal the Silver Purchase Act, a juxtaposition that must have infuriated Cleveland. The stories about his health were overshadowing one of his greatest political victories.

  Dr. Joseph Bryant was none too happy either. He’d always suspected Ferdinand Hasbrouck was the source of the original cancer rumors. His suspicions were confirmed by Edwards’s report, since it made no mention of the second operation. The leak was Hasbrouck.

  Bryant, of course, continued to deny that Cleveland had had a tumor. “The president had some teeth pulled last July, just as I announced after we landed from Mr. Benedict’s yacht,” Bryant told reporters o
n the evening that Edwards’s story broke. “I will say, however, that President Cleveland, when I saw him last Sunday, was as robust and in as good health as on any day of the ten years in which I have known him.”

  “I’m afraid that he bent the 10th Commandment rather badly,” W. W. Keen later wrote of Bryant, uncharacteristically misidentifying the divine ban on bearing false witness. The other doctors involved in the operation were forced to stretch the limits of truthfulness as well. Bryant’s assistant John Erdmann later told Cleveland biographer Allan Nevins that he did more lying during this period than in all the rest of his life put together. Even the pious Keen was forced to fib. Returning from the second operation, he’d bumped into his brother-in-law on the ferry from Fall River to New York. Asked what he was doing, Keen replied disingenuously that he’d simply had a “consultation” near Newport.

  Dr. John Erdmann was just twenty-nine when he assisted in the secret operation on President Cleveland. He would go on to have a long and successful career as a surgeon in New York City, and he would be the last surviving witness to the operation. NYU SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, EHRMAN MEDICAL LIBRARY, ARCHIVES

  When the story broke, Cleveland was still at Gray Gables, ostensibly recovering from the “strain” he had been under since reassuming the presidency. To discredit the Edwards report, Cleveland once again recruited his friends to lie for him. L. Clarke Davis, the editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, was enlisted to write an open letter to the papers. “The president’s ill health has a real basis of a toothache,” Davis wrote. “If it has any other, Mr. Cleveland’s closest friends do not know. . . . The president is in excellent health.” Davis had a summer home near Gray Gables, and the two men often fished together on Buzzards Bay. Surely he knew the president had suffered from something much more serious than a toothache.

  “All the sensational reports about the serious illness of the president are sheer nonsense,” Don Dickinson, postmaster general in Cleveland’s first administration, told reporters after visiting Gray Gables. “Why, he never looked or felt better in his life.”

  Elias Benedict told a reporter for Pulitzer’s World that reports that the president had had cancer were “all rot.” The president had merely had a tooth extracted, he said, and “a piece of the jaw bone came away.” Asked about reports that the procedure had incapacitated the president for more than a day, Benedict huffed, “All bosh!” “We played [cribbage] every day,” Benedict insisted, “and the president never missed a meal.”

  The World even managed to track down Charles Peterson, the Oneida steward who had acted as an orderly during the operation. Presumably Peterson was more susceptible than Cleveland’s doctors and friends to financial inducements from the yellow papers—a common tactic. But even the steward clung tenaciously to the fiction that nothing dramatic had happened on the yacht during the first week of July. “The president was on deck every day,” said Peterson. “I saw him there myself.”*

  Only Ferdinand Hasbrouck broke the silence. The dentist was the only person with intimate knowledge of the operation to publicly speak about it at the time. Why did he break his promise? Perhaps, when first confronted by Edwards, he honestly believed—as the newspaperman had led him to believe—that the beans had already been spilled by one of the other doctors involved. Perhaps he simply enjoyed the attention. Maybe he just didn’t want to lie anymore. In any event, as far as the rest of the insiders were concerned, he’d betrayed them. “He certainly talked a great deal more than he should have,” wrote Keen with typical restraint.

  Hasbrouck has his defenders, however. Douglas Barber, a dental historian, believes that, from the beginning, Hasbrouck was the “fall guy” in this game of political intrigue. “If the patient died,” Barber writes, “they would proclaim that he had killed the president with his black gas. If the president survived as a vocal cripple, they could blame it on bad dentistry. The phrase ‘a bad case of dentistry’ had already been used to supplement the official line about the president’s rheumatism.” Barber blames a bias against dentists for their “advanced ideas about anesthesia” at the time and believes “Hasbrouck surely does not deserve to be called the villain.”

  On August 30, the day after the Edwards report was published in the Press, Cleveland once again left Gray Gables to return to Washington. At his side was Frances, now well into her ninth month of pregnancy, who made the long trip in the searing heat without complaint. Perhaps it would be unfair to suggest that Cleveland exploited his wife’s condition, but her conspicuous presence did serve as a convenient counterbalance to questions about his health. In fact, the whole trip was carefully orchestrated to demonstrate Cleveland’s vigor. In New York, he made a point of walking from the ferry terminal to the train station, instead of riding in a carriage, as was his custom.

  “The president seems a trifle thinner than he was a year ago,” the New York Times reported the next day, “but on his face is a ruddy glow. His step last evening was elastic, his carriage erect and his actions bespoke a person enjoying perfect health. . . . His face and hands were well browned by his outdoor exercise at Buzzards Bay.”

  “A bright light was falling upon Mr. Cleveland’s face for more than ten minutes,” the World noted, “and every feature was clear and distinct.There was no sign of any operation. There was no swelling, no depression. When he spoke he uttered his words clearly and distinctly, unlike a man part of whose jawbone had been removed. His eyes were bright and clear and he seemed cheerful and contented.”

  Two days later, on September 1, Dr. Bryant examined the president in Washington and pronounced him “all healed.” Indeed his progress was extraordinary. The wound in his mouth was completely mended, so Grover could wear his oral prosthesis comfortably for long periods of time. But in other ways, the president was not “all healed,” and side effects from the operation would plague him for the rest of his life.

  Back in Washington, there were more conspicuous displays of vitality as the president embarked on his most ambitious public schedule since the operation. On the night of September 2, he went to the New National Theater to see a comedy called The Other Man.

  “The president looked very well indeed,” the New York Times reported, “and he joined heartily in the laughter.” The Chicago Daily Tribune noted that, after the play, Cleveland and his companions walked back to the White House “briskly.”

  Meanwhile, the White House was being inundated with unsolicited “cures” for the president. Letters poured in, prescribing everything from eating “plain food” to going to Colorado for a week or two to “limber up,” although Colorado, which was rabidly pro-silver, was probably the last place on Earth that Grover wanted to go.

  A concerned citizen from Chicago sent this advice:

  I do not know what truth there may be in the stories of the cancerous nature of the president’s late difficulty and do not seek any ex cathedra knowledge, but I know of a remedy, thoroughly investigated by me, used under my personal observation with great success, and used by my wife to her own recovery from a most virulent and protracted attack. The remedy consists simply of a tonic ... it is made chiefly of old-fashioned herbs, is pleasant to take, harmless in every way, and is little known because the compounder, a physician of good education, does not realize the value, or have the capital to push the remedy. I stumbled on it by accident myself.

  The remedy is invented and put up by Dr. S. Brumbaugh of Dayton, Ohio. If the president has any trouble of a cancerous nature, I am sure this man’s remedy will stop all pain and effect a radical cure. The doctor is rather a rattle-headed fellow, but he has found a cancer cure [emphasis in original]. It is a case where “these things are withheld from the wise and revealed unto babes.”

  I should consider it a great public calamity at this time if anything should take President Cleveland from the helm.

  Cleveland faced his biggest test on September 6, when he hosted a White House reception for hundreds of doctors attending the Pan-American Medical Congress in Washing
ton. He passed with flying colors. The president mingled among the doctors, none of whom detected any sign of surgery having been performed on him. He even gave a short speech, praising “those who devote themselves to saving human life and to the alleviation of human suffering.” His voice was described as clear and articulate. Some said the president hadn’t sounded so good since his inauguration. He seemed to be the picture of health.

  ______________

  * W. W. Keen later noted that the steward received “scant credit” for keeping the secret.

  9

  LIAR

  WHEN E. J. EDWARDS left the New York Sun for the Philadelphia Press in 1889, he traded one newspaper war for another. The competition for readers was no less intense in Philadelphia than it was in New York, and no two papers in the City of Brotherly Love competed more fiercely than the Press and the Times.

  Press publisher Charles Emory Smith was Philly’s version of Charles Dana, an erudite New Englander infatuated with the English language. “The readers of the Press are familiar with his style,” a contemporary wrote, “a clear, strong variety of English which admits of no beating around the bush.” Born in 1842, Smith was just sixteen when he began his newspaper career writing editorials for the Albany Evening Transcript. In 1861 he graduated from Union College in Schenectady and became a recruiting officer for the Union Army. After the war he worked at newspapers in Albany before purchasing an interest in the Press in 1880.