Anything for a Vote

by Joseph Cummins

  Blaine’s dealings with the burgeoning railroads—who pushed as much money into Washington as defense contractors do today—were particularly suspect. An especially damning moment occurred when Democrats uncovered a letter written by Blaine to Warren Fisher, a Boston railroad attorney. In the letter, Blaine appeared complicit in shady business dealings. It didn’t help that Blaine signed off “My regards to Mrs. Fisher. Burn this letter!”

  The Democrats impaled the Plumed Knight on his own lance, gleefully chanting “Burn this letter! Burn this letter!” and “Blaine, Blaine, James. G. Blaine, the Continental liar from the state of Maine!”

  They thought they had a lock on the sleaze issue, since their “ugly honest” candidate—a.k.a. Grover the Good—was known to have unimpeachable morals. But then on July 21, Cleveland’s hometown paper, the Buffalo Evening Telegraph, published a sordid story with a real grabber of a headline: “A Terrible Tale: A Dark Chapter in a Public Man’s History—The Pitiful Story of Maria Halpin and Governor Cleveland’s Son.”

  It turned out that in 1874, when he was bachelor about town, Cleveland had embarked on an “illicit” affair with a thirty-six-year-old widow named Maria Halpin. She later gave birth to a boy, whom Cleveland gallantly supported, even though he privately acknowledged doubts about the child’s real paternity.

  The Republicans went wild over this story (much as they did in 1992 when Bill Clinton’s alleged dalliance with torch singer Gennifer Flowers made headlines). One Buffalo minister proclaimed: “The issue is evidently not between the two great parties, but between the brothel and the family, … between lust and law.” Editorialists cried: “We do not believe that the American people will knowingly elect to the Presidency a coarse debaucher who will bring his harlots with him to Washington.” Cleveland was called a “lecherous beast” and “moral leper” and, for good measure, “an obese nincompoop.” (Cleveland tipped the hay scales at about 250 pounds.)

  Republicans now had their own derisive chant: “Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa?” (Cartoons pictured Halpin plaintively searching for Cleveland while holding a baby—a trifle ridiculous since, by this time, the child was ten years old.)

  And so the 1884 presidential contest degenerated, as one foreign observer drolly noted, into a contest between “the copulative habits of one candidate and the prevaricative habits of the other.” In other words, was it worse to be a fornicator or a liar and thief? It was the first time this conundrum crystallized so clearly in an American presidential race, but by no means was it the last.

  Cleveland’s response to the situation should have set an example for Bill Clinton. When Democrats rushed to Cleveland, begging him to defend himself, he simply said: “Above all, tell the truth.”

  And that is what they did. Cleveland acknowledged he was supporting the child (who had been adopted by others) and refused to say anything else about the issue. Cleveland had a few advantages over Clinton, of course—he wasn’t married, and Maria Halpin stayed in seclusion and refused to give statements—but his honesty helped him weather the crisis. It also happened early in the campaign, leaving Cleveland time before Election Day to shift the focus to other issues.

  Most Americans then—as now—were more forgiving of lechery than hypocrisy.

  THE WINNER: GROVER CLEVELAND

  It was a close race. Grover Cleveland won 4,874,621 votes; Blaine came in with 4,848,936. It was the first time since the 1856 administration of James Buchanan that a Democrat sat in the White House. And gleeful supporters of Grover Cleveland were able to chant: “Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa?” “Gone to the White House! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

  BLACK WEDNESDAY October 29, 1884, is among the worst days that a presidential candidate has ever had—worse than Nixon during that first 1960 debate, worse than Edmund Muskie weeping at a news conference in 1972, worse than the Howard Dean Scream in the 2004 primaries. If not for that day’s events, James G. Blaine would have won the 1884 election.

  Just as Cleveland weathered the Maria Halpin crisis, Blaine was overcoming charges that he was on the take. His stumping and passionate speech-making seemed to be winning over voters. He arrived in New York with a slim lead in the state and—on that fateful Wednesday morning—sat down to a breakfast meeting at just another whistle stop on the campaign trail for the weary Blaine.

  Unfortunately, during the seemingly unending meeting, a local Presbyterian minister by the name of S. D. Burchard got carried away in attacking the Democrats; Burchard called them the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” essentially slurring them as Irish Catholic drunks. Even more unfortunately, Blaine apparently wasn’t listening and did not denounce Burchard’s intemperance when he got up to speak.

  A Democrat attending the meeting took down Burchard’s words and raced to local party headquarters. Campaign operatives immediately set to work printing thousands of handbills describing Blaine as a “Catholic-hater.” In a city full of Irish Catholic working-class immigrants, this would not sit well.

  In the evening of October 29, Blaine—who still had no idea what was happening—attended an entirely different sort of event: a dinner at the stylish Delmonico’s restaurant in the company of Republican tycoons the likes of Jay Gould, John Jacob Astor, and Cyrus W. Field. The following day, just as the “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion” handbills were hitting the streets, newspaper headlines described “The Royal Feast of Belshazzar Blaine and the Money Kings.”

  This was a brutal one-two publicity punch, and it cost Blaine the election. He lost New York State by a mere 1,149 votes. Had it not been (as he later put it) for “an ass in the shape of a preacher,” he would have won New York and become president of the United States.

  MARK TWAIN AND LADIES OF THE NIGHT Mark Twain, a Republican, left his party over the nomination of James G. Blaine, whom he considered hopelessly corrupt. When the whole Cleveland–Maria Halpin affair news broke, he couldn’t believe the hypocrisy of those who criticized the Democratic candidate: “To see grown men, apparently in their right mind, seriously arguing against a bachelor’s fitness for President because he has had private intercourse with a consenting widow! These grown men know what the bachelor’s other alternative was—& tacitly they seem to prefer that to the widow. Isn’t human nature the most consummate sham & lie that was ever invented?”

  When Republicans learned of Grover Cleveland’s illegitimate child, they called their opponent “a lecherous beast” and “a moral leper.”

  BENJAMIN HARRISON

  VS. GROVER CLEVELAND

  The election of 1888 was close and dirty. In one corner was Grover Cleveland, the Democratic president who had for four years labored stubbornly to continue civil service reform and put an end to high import tariffs. (Along with many Democrats, he thought the protective barriers lined the pockets of tycoons while making the cost of goods prohibitive for working people.)

  In the other corner was Republican nominee Benjamin Harrison, a distinguished Civil War veteran and Indiana senator. The aloof fifty-four-year-old Harrison was a second choice for many Republicans (1884 nominee James G. Blaine still had plenty of supporters), but Harrison had good bloodlines. He was the grandson of President William “Old Tippecanoe” Harrison, who had died in 1840 after only a month in office. He also supported the high tariffs that made the Republican tycoons so rich.

  THE CAMPAIGN No one talked much about the Maria Halpin affair anymore because President Cleveland had married during his first term as president (the first such ceremony ever performed in the White House). Nevertheless, Republicans seized on the fact that Cleveland had wed his former ward, Frances Folsom, the daughter of his late law partner—she was twenty-one years old, and some twenty-eight years younger than the man she once referred to as Uncle Cleve. Many Republicans were titillated by the incestuous nature of their union; they referred to Cleveland as the “Beast of Buffalo” and even spread rumors that he beat Frances. In one of the most extraordinary official utterances made by a first lady in the nineteenth century, Frances issued a statement ca
lling the charges “a foolish campaign ploy without a shadow of foundation.”

  Democrats nicknamed the difficult and aristocratic Harrison “Kid Glove,” but in truth, they had a hard time laying a glove on this smart, veteran campaigner. Harrison had learned from Blaine’s Black Wednesday mistake that too much campaigning could leave one vulnerable to the Reverend Burchards of the world.

  And so he began the nation’s first front-porch campaign, allowing crowds to gather at his Indianapolis home for a brief address once a day, and then sending out a carefully worded version of his remarks to the Associated Press for nationwide dissemination. This early form of spin control kept his message out in the public while letting him rest comfortably in his own bed at night. (Cleveland chose not to campaign, even from his front porch, and relied instead upon his inept running mate, seventy-five-year-old Allen G. Thurman, who, during speeches, would forget what he was supposed to be talking about and start complaining about his rheumatism.)

  Of course, Benjamin Harrison also had the benefit of Republican money. Lots of it. The Republican national campaign manager, Matthew S. Quay, remarked that he would “fry the fat” out of Republican businessmen who benefited from the protective tariffs—and he did, collecting more than $3 million, much of it from the American Iron and Steel Association. At the same time, mill workers received slips tucked into their pay envelopes threatening them with the loss of their jobs if tariffs were abolished and cheap foreign goods were to flood the country.

  THE WINNER: BENJAMIN HARRISON It took a lot of dirty tricks—including more vote buying in Indiana, where Republican “floaters” were now paid as much as fifteen dollars a head and literally marched to the polls by party operatives before they got too drunk to vote—but Benjamin Harrison became president in 1888. Even though he lost the popular vote by 90,000 votes, garnering 5,443,892 to Cleveland’s 5,534,488, Harrison won in the Electoral College 233 to 168. One big victory was in New York State, where thirty-six electoral votes went to Harrison after the Democratic candidate for governor there made a deal with Harrison’s people: In return for enough Republican votes to give him the gubernatorial victory, he would deliver New York to Harrison.

  The dirty tricks in this campaign were such that Republican bigwig Matthew Quay remarked pointedly, Harrison would never know how many Republicans “were compelled to approach the gates of the penitentiary to make him president.”

  GROVER CLEVELAND

  VS. BENJAMIN HARRISON

  The election of 1892 was a transitional one—not the most exciting presidential battle in history. But the country was experiencing major changes.

  The U.S. population had risen to more than sixty-two million; even more significantly, the population center had shifted westward. Six western states had been admitted to the Union in 1889 and 1890—North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming. A telephone line now stretched between New York City and Chicago. Thomas Edison had invented the kinetoscope, the first moving picture camera. And a new portable Kodak camera was put on the market in 1888. Instead of using dry plate negatives, it employed a spool of flexible film with one hundred exposures that could be developed at a dealer or sent directly to Kodak headquarters in Rochester, New York.

  Suddenly, everybody was a shutterbug. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to be photographed in the election of 1892. Benjamin Harrison spent most of his White House tenure controlled by the corrupt Republican bosses who had helped him win in 1888. The bosses couldn’t stand the prickly, born-again Christian president, claiming that Harrison was “as glacial as a Siberian stripped of his furs” and that talking to him even in warm weather made a person feel like putting on “winter flannels, galoshes, overcoat, mitts, and earlap.”

  Cleveland, on the other hand, was still popular with millions of Americans—after all, this was the man whose baby daughter, Ruth, had a candy bar named after her. He hungered for a third nomination and second term, and so the race against frosty Ben Harrison was on.

  THE CAMPAIGN Cleveland still did not take to the stump, although he broke with tradition to become the first presidential nominee to make a public speech in acceptance of his nomination, rather than simply sending out a letter of acceptance.

  And Harrison, preoccupied with his ill wife (who died two weeks before Election Day) did not repeat his front-porch PR coup of the previous election. With running mate Whitelaw Reid, he spent most of his time emphasizing his support of high tariffs and protectionism. Unfortunately, a violent Homestead, Pennsylvania, strike in July 1892—during which Andrew Carnegie’s general manager, Henry Clay Frick, cut steel mill workers wages 20 percent and then hired armed Pinkerton agents to battle them when they struck—was a PR disaster and may have cost Harrison the election.

  Homestead helped Cleveland (running with veep nominee Adlai E. Stevenson, grandfather of the future Democratic presidential candidate) immensely with labor, demonstrating in action that high tariff barriers did not translate to high wages for workers.

  THE WINNER: GROVER CLEVELAND Cleveland won convincingly with 5,551,883 votes to Harrison’s 5,179,244. He carried seven Northern states as well as the usual Democratic Southern voting bloc, and he entered the record books as the first and only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms.

  But change was in the wind. The new Populist Party, a grassroots amalgam of farmers and factory workers whose platform called for fair wages, public ownership of railroads, telegraph and telephones, and a restoration of government “to the hands of plain people” had garnered more than one million votes for its candidate, James B. Weaver. Weaver had stumped throughout the country with a truly charismatic American orator, the little-known Mary Elizabeth Lease, a woman who decried a “government of Wall Street, for Wall Street, and by Wall Street” and who told farmers in rallies that resembled religious revivals “to raise less corn and more hell.”

  This western groundswell was heading East. And party bosses, both Republican and Democrat, were about to see the beginning of the end of their storied power.

  WILLIAM MCKINLEY

  VS.

  WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN

  “[Bryan] is an irresponsible, unregulated, ignorant, prejudiced, pathetically honest and enthusiastic crank.”

  —New York Times

  Poor Grover the Good. No sooner had he begun his second term when much of the world slid into a horrific economic depression that would last from 1893 to 1897. In America, within just a year of Cleveland’s second inauguration, fifteen thousand businesses went under and four million workers lost their jobs. A half-million laborers went on strike against substandard wages and working conditions. Most of the strikes were broken by the police and the military. Bands of homeless people wandered the country in search of shelter and employment. An army of poor people marched on Washington. A more dismal picture would not be seen in the land until the Great Depression of the 1930s.

  America was changing, and the political parties were changing with it. What many historians call the great realignment of 1896 was about to occur. In it, the Republican Party would finally reach out to blue-collar workers, in much the same way it did when Richard Nixon ran on his “Silent Majority” theme in the 1960s. In another foreshadowing of 1968, the Democrats embraced a young, passionate, and extraordinarily charismatic candidate.

  The campaign was all about currency standards and precious metal—gold clashing with silver—and the sparks were about to fly.

  THE CANDIDATES

  REPUBLICAN: WILLIAM MCKINLEY The fifty-three-year-old McKinley—of the starched shirt, double-breasted coat, red carnation, and mainstream American Methodism—had a long political record as a congressman and then governor of Ohio. He was smart, dependable, and upstanding. If you were a certain class of American, you felt reassured just by looking at the guy and hearing his stentorian tones. His campaign was run by Mark Hanna, a powerfully astute political operator who pioneered many of the techniques used in modern campaigning.

  DEMOCRAT: WILLIA
M JENNINGS BRYAN At the age of thirty-six, Bryan was (and still is) the youngest man ever to receive a major party’s nomination for president. He was known as “The Great Commoner”—a Nebraska native, evangelical Christian, and passionate speaker who traveled 18,000 miles (all by train, of course) through twenty-seven states, making up to thirty-six speeches a day on behalf of a new currency standard and the down-trodden farmers. The lean, handsome Bryan ate six meals a day just to keep up his strength during the grueling campaign. He also enjoyed relaxing rubdowns with gin, leading many people he met to believe he was a drunk.

  THE CAMPAIGN

  William McKinley and Mark Hanna remembered the lessons of Benjamin Harrison’s presidential campaign in 1888: Harrison had promised so many favors to eastern party bosses to get elected, he could hardly accomplish anything once he arrived in the White House.

  They realized that the times were changing. The decisive moment came in the months before the Republican convention, when party bosses Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania and Senator Thomas Platt of New York demanded that McKinley make Platt secretary of the treasury. And they wanted McKinley to put the promise in writing.

  McKinley simply told Hanna: “There are some things in the world that come too high. If I cannot be president without promising to make Tom Platt Secretary of the Treasury, I will never be president.”