The President Is a Sick Man

by Matthew Algeo

  Even Edwards’s peers were inclined to give the president, not the newspaperman, the benefit of the doubt. While acknowledging the “brilliant scope of Mr. Edwards,” the trade journal the Journalist concluded that “his assertion that the operation was for the removal of a cancerous growth must be set down, at least, as not proven, for while no official denial has been made, the doctors and near friends of Mr. Cleveland say that the operation was simply for the removal of ulcerated teeth and a portion of the jaw bone which had become affected.”

  Ultimately, E. J. Edwards’s reputation was seriously compromised. He had been labeled a “faker,” and that label would stick to him for a long time. The criticism was wholly unjustified, of course, but Edwards took it stoically, in a manner befitting a nineteenth-century gentleman. Yet it must have eaten away at him.

  Grover Cleveland would also benefit—if that’s the right word—from one of the worst natural disasters in American history, which would sweep questions about his health off the front pages.

  Around nine o’clock on the night of August 10, 1893, a meteor as big as a barrel streaked across the sky over Savannah, Georgia, and plunged into Wassaw Sound, a coastal bay where the Wilmington River flows into the Atlantic. The impact resonated with a tremendous explosion and sent a geyser of steam rising high into the warm night air. To the Gullah, the African American residents of the Sea Islands off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina, the meteor was a bad omen. More than one hundred thousand Gullah lived on the islands and the coastal plain, a region known as the Lowcountry. They were former slaves and their descendents, desperately poor and deeply superstitious. The doorframes of their rickety wooden houses were painted bright blue to ward off evil spirits. They believed the meteor, which landed very close to them, portended something sinister. The older Gullah well remembered that August was the month that disastrous storms had swept across their islands in 1856, 1881, 1885, and 1886.

  To the white residents of the coastal region, the meteor was nothing more than an unusual if rather frightening meteorological phenomenon. They paid no heed to the superstitions of the Sea Island “darkies.”

  However, on Tuesday, August 22, just twelve days after the meteor strike, ships sailing into Savannah carried disquieting news: a major storm was brewing off the coast. In fact, as meteorologists would later discover, not one but four hurricanes were swirling simultaneously in the Atlantic that day, an event never before recorded, and one that would not be repeated until 1998. Two of the hurricanes would peter out before causing major damage, but on Wednesday, August 23, one of the storms slammed into New York City with, by one account, “unexampled fury.” At least thirty people were killed, mostly sailors whose boats capsized. A thirty-foot storm surge swept across southern Brooklyn and Queens, destroying virtually everything in its path. On Coney Island, the elevated railroad was swept away. Hog Island, a mile-long island off Long Island that was a playground for the rich and famous, was completely obliterated. It literally vanished overnight. The 1893 New York hurricane remains one of the most destructive storms in U.S. history.

  Yet it was nothing compared to the storm that would hit the Sea Islands just four days later.

  Even before those ships had sailed into Savannah with news of the storm, Lewis N. Jesunofsky, a Weather Bureau forecaster in the city, suspected something serious was afoot in the Atlantic. The barometric pressure was falling precipitously, and wind speeds were rising ominously. Jesunofsky knew he had to warn residents of the impending storm, but his options were limited. Red and black hurricane flags were hoisted above government buildings. Bulletins were posted on telegraph poles. Perhaps he mailed a few postcards to the outlying islands. Local newspapers were little help. On Saturday, August 26, the Savannah Morning News carried a small item headlined, “Another Storm Coming.” It appeared on the bottom of page eight. By the time most Sea Islanders realized how destructive the storm would be, it was far too late.

  It made landfall on the afternoon of Sunday, August 27. The eye passed over Savannah around 10:00 P.M. More than ten inches of rain fell that night, with winds reaching 120 miles per hour. The storm surge was estimated to be anywhere from sixteen to thirty feet. Under the modern classification system, the storm was a Category 3 hurricane. In Beaufort, South Carolina, about twenty miles north of Savannah, the tide was eight feet higher than normal, with waves of twenty feet. The storm raged for fourteen hours. “Sunday night was a night of sheer terror,” write Bill and Fran Marscher in The Great Sea Island Storm of 1893. “Those who lived through it never forgot it.”

  When dawn broke on Monday, August 28, the scene was one of appalling devastation. The low-lying Sea Islands were swamped. As many as two thousand people, mostly Gullah, were dead. Hundreds had been washed out to sea, never to be seen again. The Sea Island hurricane still stands as the third or fourth deadliest in U.S. history. The Gullah’s houses were smashed to splinters. Some thirty thousand people were rendered homeless. The corn and potato crops, the Gullah’s main source of sustenance, were ruined. They had no drinking water, for their wells had been contaminated with seawater. These were the poorest people in one of the poorest states in a nation crippled by depression—and now what little they had had was gone. One eyewitness said, “Death and destruction seemed triumphant all around.” In Gullah folklore the storm would be remembered as “de big blow.”

  This already isolated region was now completely cut off from the rest of the world. It took four days for a message from the Sea Islands to reach South Carolina governor Ben Tillman. The telegram begged for “speedy relief.” Tillman’s reply was hardly encouraging. He appealed for donations of food and clothing but warned the Gullah that he did not want any “abuse of charity.” “We want to guard against those people who, seeing that aid is coming, might do nothing.”

  Pitchfork Ben, as he liked to call himself in a transparent homage to farmers, was a notorious racist. In 1900 he would brag about how effectively South Carolina had managed to disenfranchise African Americans: “We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.” He was not inclined to go out of his way to help the Gullah. “The people have the fish of the sea there to prevent them from starving,” he said. Of course, the people had neither boats nor nets to fish with. They had all been destroyed in the storm.

  Given Grover Cleveland’s aversion to “paternalism,” it’s not surprising that the federal government was no more responsive. When Senator Matthew Butler of South Carolina appealed to Secretary of War Dan Lamont for assistance, Lamont said it would be unconstitutional for the government to provide direct aid, though he did offer to lend some spare tents to the homeless. It was a principled position, though not a very popular one, and it did little to endear Grover Cleveland to a public grown weary of the panic.

  Three weeks after the storm hit, Clara Barton inspected the region at the request of Governor Tillman and Senator Butler. Barton had founded the American Red Cross as a disaster relief organization twelve years earlier. She had seen her share of tragedies, but nothing prepared her for what she encountered on the Sea Islands. Bloated corpses were still lying in muddy fields. There were no shovels to bury the bodies, and even if there had been, the people were too weak to dig. More numerous were the carcasses of cows and horses killed under collapsed barns or drowned in pastures. Malaria was already rampant. Simply cleaning up would be an enormous undertaking; rebuilding, even more so. But the most pressing needs were the most basic: food, clothing, shelter.

  Although she was seventy-two, Barton organized the relief effort with the energy of a woman half her age. She commandeered two large warehouses in Beaufort for a command post. She determined that “a fixed system of relief must be adopted, a rigid economy enforced,” and “every person who could do so must be made to work for his food and receive food and raiment only in return for labor.” She appealed to Northern newspapers for help, and soon trains and boats laden with donated goods were steaming into Beaufort. For the papers, the hurricane was a bonanz
a, providing them with sensational stories of death and survival, as well as a crusade. Hurricane relief became a cause célèbre. Newspapers practically tripped over each other in publishing appeals for donation. Not to be outdone, Pulitzer’s World even commissioned a train to deliver donated supplies, which were sorted at the warehouses and then delivered by small boats to the islanders.

  The Red Cross would have to feed as many as seventy-five thousand people for eight months, until the spring crops could be harvested. “The charge was immense,” Barton wrote. “Not alone the welfare, the lives of these thousands of human beings would be in our hands.” The rations were necessarily meager: eight quarts of hominy grits and one pound of pork per week for a family of seven. But it was enough to survive.

  The Red Cross also struggled to restore the landscape. To earn their rations, able-bodied men were put to work digging ditches to drain the islands, planting crops, and, with donated lumber and tools, building new houses, first for widows and the infirm.

  The winter passed. It was hard, but there was no famine. In the spring, the corn and potatoes returned. The Red Cross distributed its last rations in May 1894. In September, the organization departed. Barton believed it was just as important to know when to end relief efforts as when to begin them.

  The hurricane had pummeled the Sea Islands just two days before E. J. Edwards published his beat on August 29. As the enormity of the tragedy became apparent, stories from the Sea Islands pushed reports about the secret operation on the president out of the papers. The timing of the tragedy was perfect for purposes of the cover-up.

  Then something happened that would put questions about Grover’s health to rest for good.

  On the morning of Saturday, September 9, a “general air of expectancy” permeated the White House. The doorkeepers and valets walked on tiptoes across the marble floors. Grover was behind his massive Resolute desk as usual, but he was clearly preoccupied. Just down the hall, in the master bedroom, Frances was in labor. Dr. Bryant was with her, and occasionally he would scribble a message on a small slip of paper and have it delivered to the president. Between these updates, Grover, as anxious as any expectant father, pretended to work. At eleven o’clock he sent a note to Dan Lamont at the War Department. The Marine Band was scheduled to perform a public concert on the White House lawn that afternoon. Grover asked Lamont to cancel it.

  Childbirth was a dangerous endeavor in 1893. It killed one out of every one hundred women giving birth. (Today the rate in developed nations is one out of every ten thousand women.) Obstetrics was just emerging as a medical specialty. Physicians had begun replacing mid-wives, but only among the upper classes. Obstetrical wards had been established in some hospitals in the 1880s, though only the urban poor, whose homes were generally small and unhygienic, gave birth in hospitals. Women of means would not begin having children in hospitals in large numbers until well into the twentieth century.

  While we can never know for certain the details of what happened in the master bedroom that morning, it’s safe to assume that certain Gilded Age conventions were adhered to. Even in the intimacy of childbirth, modesty ruled the relationship between doctor and patient. It’s likely Frances gave birth lying on her side with her knees pulled up to her chest. This is known as the Sims’ position, named for J. Marion Sims, a nineteenth-century physician who pioneered advances in gynecology, though this progress came at the expense of the enslaved women on whom he experimented. In the Sims’ position, the mother can avoid eye contact with the doctor, thereby preserving her dignity, the reasoning went. Dr. Bryant, meanwhile, would be expected to avert his eyes from the main event. Doctors were encouraged to deliver babies “by touch,” so as to avoid offending women by looking at their genitalia.

  By this cumbersome process, a healthy baby girl was delivered at noon. A few minutes later, Grover was summoned to the bedroom. Bryant informed him that Mrs. Cleveland had given birth to a “remarkably healthy and vigorous” girl. The mother, he said, was doing “wonderfully well.” The two men then shook hands warmly. Grover asked the doctor to keep the news to himself for the time being. Then he visited his wife and their newborn for about fifteen minutes before returning to his desk.

  At two o’clock that afternoon, Grover finally broadcast the news. He informed his cabinet, and one of his secretaries told an Associated Press correspondent, “You can tell the world that we have a little girl baby here.” Soon telegrams and letters of congratulations were pouring in. The Clevelands would receive more than seventeen thousand in all. In a rare display of leniency, Grover gave the White House staff the rest of the day off.

  The second Cleveland daughter was the first and thus far only child of a president to be born in the White House itself, though she was not the first baby born there. Nine other children had already entered the world within the historic walls of the presidential mansion. The first was Thomas Jefferson’s grandson, James Madison Randolph, in 1806. John Quincy Adams and Ulysses Grant each welcomed a grandchild there. John Tyler greeted two. And Andrew Jackson’s niece Emily Donelson gave birth to four children in the White House. Since the birth of the Cleveland daughter, however, only one other baby has been born in the White House: Woodrow Wilson’s grandson, Francis B. Sayre Jr., in 1915. Sayre became a prominent minister, serving twenty-seven years as dean of the National Cathedral in Washington. He died in 2008.

  Since the Clevelands already had a daughter, many Americans had hoped their second child would be a boy. “When the news that the . . . child was a girl spread through the city,” one paper reported, “there were many expressions of disappointment.” The proud parents, however, couldn’t have been happier. “She is a sweet baby,” Frances wrote to a friend, “looking much as Ruth did at her age, with dark eyes and hair. All here are pleased that she is a girl, however disappointed the nation may be.”

  Six days later, the Clevelands announced the baby’s name: Esther. The papers said the name carried no special significance “other than the partiality of the parents for Scriptural denominatives.” (In the Old Testament, Esther is a queen, the wife of King Ahasuerus.) It was also noted that the name means “star.” Even in 1893 the name was considered old-fashioned, and, unlike with her older sister, Esther’s birth did not inspire a wave of namesakes. Between 1892 and 1894, the name only rose from sixty-seventh to thirty-sixth on the list of most popular names for baby girls. Still, it was a fine name. “The president’s babies are happily named,” opined the Richmond Dispatch. “Ruth and Esther go well together, and they are short, sensible, and nonpartisan names.”

  The birth of Esther seemed to prove that Cleveland was healthy— even virile—and apparently settled the matter once and for all: the president was not a sick man.

  On September 11, two days after the birth, Grover wrote his friend Thomas Bayard, who was the American ambassador to Britain. In this unusually personal letter, Grover discussed his health and E. J. Edwards’s report in the Philadelphia Press. These are his only words on the matter known to have survived.

  The report you saw regarding my health resulted from a most astounding breach of professional duty on the part of a medical man [Ferdinand Hasbrouck]. I tell you this in strict confidence, for the policy here has been to deny and discredit his story. I believe the American public and newspapers are not speculating further on the subject.

  The truth is, officeseeking and officeseekers came very near putting a period to my public career. Whatever else developed found its opportunity in the weakened walls of a constitution that had long withstood fierce attacks. I turned the corner to the stage of enforced care-taking almost in a day. And this must be hereafter the condition on which will depend my health and life. Another phase of the situation cannot be spoken of with certainty, but I believe the chances in my favor are at least even.

  I have learned how weak the strongest man is under God’s decrees and I see in a new light the necessity of doing my allotted work in the full apprehension of the coming night.

  You
must understand that I am regarded here as a perfectly well man and the story of an important surgical operation is thoroughly discredited. I think I never looked better and I am much stronger than I have lately been. You have now more of the story than anyone else outside of the medical circle.

  PART III

  VINDICATION

  10

  AFTERMATH

  HOSEA PERKINS was a millionaire who lived in a mansion in Washington Heights, a neighborhood on the north end of Manhattan. He’d made his fortune in the carpet business. After he retired, he indulged his passion for learning by earning degrees from Bowdoin College and Dartmouth. He started a second career as an orator and was much in demand as an after-dinner speaker. He was also famous for his Independence Day speeches. His neighbors called him the Sage of Washington Heights.

  Hosea was an early riser, and on the morning of Tuesday, September 12, 1893, he was out of bed by six o’clock as usual. He opened the bedroom blinds, and in the dawning light he saw a man sleeping on his front lawn. Perturbed, he donned a robe and slippers and went outside to rouse the vagrant. It probably wasn’t the first time a wayward drunk had made himself comfortable on Hosea Perkins’s luxuriant lawn.

  Stepping out his front door, Hosea called out to the prostrate stranger but got no answer. As he moved closer to him, Hosea was surprised to see the man was dressed in a fine suit. Beside him was a lovely silver-tipped cane. The cane looked familiar to Hosea.