Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  Drunk or not, Maria was sent to the insane asylum, according to Dr. William Ring, the attending physician, “without warrant or form of law.” When Ring examined Maria, he determined that she was “boozy” but “not insane.” Since there was “no authority for committing an intemperate person to the asylum,” Ring advised Maria to stay long enough to dry out; according to Ring, she spent about a week at the asylum. She hired M. A. Whitney, one of the leading lawyers in Erie County, to institute proceedings against Cleveland for “abduction and false imprisonment.” Whitney investigated Maria’s assertion that Cleveland “had plotted the abduction and hired the man to carry it out” and “was on the eve of taking legal measures for redress,” he said, when Simeon Talbott, Maria’s brother-in-law, arrived from Jersey City.

  Talbott was “anxious to avoid public scandal” so that “innocent parties” wouldn’t have to bear the weight of “Maria’s shame.” He showed up at Whitney’s office with Maria and an agreement “in the handwriting of Grover Cleveland,” according to Whitney, that “stipulated that upon the payment of the sum of $500 Maria Halpin was to surrender her son, Oscar Folsom Cleveland, and make no further demands of any nature whatever.” Under pressure from Talbott, Maria signed the agreement, left Buffalo, and never saw Oscar again. He was adopted by Dr. King.

  * * *

  Maria Halpin would have been just another “ruined” woman lost to history if Grover Cleveland hadn’t experienced one of history’s most meteoric political rises, benefiting time and again from a divided opposition party and a climate that favored a little-known political outsider free from the corruption of machine politics. From being what one local politician described as a “fair lawyer in the host of average lawyers” in Buffalo in the 1870s—albeit one with a reputation for prodigious hard work and integrity—Cleveland won an upset victory to become mayor in 1881 after being drafted by local officials casting about for a reform candidate. While in office, he earned a reputation as a crusader against corruption after he vetoed an exorbitant street-cleaning contract that epitomized the graft that had overtaken the governments of many cities.

  By this time, he was the Cleveland of caricature, a heavyset walrus of a man, right down to his mustache. He was, according to the historian Merrill, a fundamentally conservative, parochial man who was “remarkably unreceptive to new ideas” and who had little taste for travel or culture to broaden his worldview. His hallmarks were a narrowly legalistic approach to the law and a “frustrated, uneasy retreat into conservatism” when challenged. His basic political philosophy came down to spending as little taxpayer money as possible while giving businesses and industry a free hand to make as much money as possible.

  In 1882, Cleveland was elected governor of New York State, carried into office by pro-reform Democrats who wanted a governor who was fundamentally honest but not particularly imaginative; they didn’t want him championing any newfangled social legislation or giving in to public agitation to regulate increasingly monopolistic business concerns. He vetoed a popular bill that would have reduced the rush-hour fare for New York’s elevated railroad to five cents after the “much-despised Jay Gould” merged two railroad companies and doubled the peak fare to ten cents. He vetoed a bill that would have limited the number of hours that horse-drawn streetcar conductors could work to twelve from the usual fourteen to sixteen, calling it “class legislation.” He wasn’t a particularly savvy politician, displaying a distinctly rigid, sanctimonious streak, but it often served him well in the eyes of the public, who, says Merrill, saw in his unwillingness to compromise a “refreshing moral correctness.” When he lurched into a battle with Tammany Hall, the infamous political machine that controlled New York City, over political appointments, he nearly split the party and unwittingly torpedoed two important reform bills, but what the public remembered was his willingness to confront the feared Tammany Tiger.

  Within two years, “Grover the Good” was the Democratic nominee for president of the United States and a favorite to win after an influential group of Republicans known as the “mugwumps” deserted Republican nominee James Blaine, who had been implicated in shady financial dealings with the railroads. But Cleveland’s momentum came to a halt less than ten days after he accepted the nomination in July 1884, when an upstart Buffalo paper, the Evening Telegraph, broke the story of the Halpin affair, which had lived on in rumor long after Maria departed the city, under the headline “A Terrible Tale.” The accusation that Cleveland had ruined a respectable woman—she was seduced under the promise of marriage, it was reported—had taken her son from her, drove her to drink, and then tried to dump her in an insane asylum, was potentially devastating to any candidate, never mind Grover the Good.

  By the first week of August, the story of the scandal had been printed in papers across the country. In an era of partisan newspapers, it was largely ignored or downplayed by Democratic-leaning papers like the New York World and trumped by Republican-leaning papers like the Chicago Daily Tribune, but it was obviously having an effect. The New York Evening Post editorialized: “We do not believe that the American people will ever elect a notorious libertine and profligate to the office of the President of the United States.” Cleveland’s backers tried to diffuse the story by claiming that only a candidate’s public actions, not their private life, should be considered as qualification for office. “The issue of the campaign is not one of personal character,” the World editor Joseph Pulitzer told one audience.

  A week after the initial story appeared, the influential Boston Journal published an independently reported confirmation. Rumors began circulating of other women Cleveland had taken advantage of. There were reports that the Democrats might ask Cleveland to step down in the face of a “serious stampede” away from him. Cleveland famously instructed his campaign managers to “tell the truth” after the story broke, but a wholesale denial would have been pointless; too many people in Buffalo knew the story. “I don’t think there is an intelligent man in the city who questions the substantial truth of the terrible story,” one local Methodist minister wrote. On August 5, a “defense” of Cleveland was published in the Evening Post. Cleveland’s allies admitted that he had “formed an irregular connection with a widow” twelve years ago but asserted that “she was a person of intemperate habits, and that the paternity of a child born subsequently was doubtful.” The article not only backdated Maria’s Cleveland-induced drinking problem to suggest she had been dissolute all along, but also absolved Cleveland of any responsibility for sending Maria to the asylum. It claimed that Roswell Burrows had charge of the matter and hired Watts, who supposedly found Maria “suffering from delirium tremens and threatening to kill the child,” so she was taken to the “inebriate Asylum for treatment.”

  Charles McCune, the editor of the city’s leading paper, the Buffalo Courier, and a longtime backer of Cleveland’s, started spreading the rumor that Oscar Folsom, who had died in a buggy accident the year after his namesake was born, was Oscar’s father and that Cleveland hadn’t spoken out to protect him. Privately, Cleveland was furious that someone was besmirching the name of his friend. “Is he fool enough to suppose for a moment that if such was the truth (which it is not, so far as the motive for my silence is concerned) that I would permit my dead friend’s name to suffer for my sake?… This story of McCune’s must be stopped,” he wrote to a friend. Publicly, however, Cleveland didn’t deny the rumor, a classic example of what the historian Merrill calls his willingness to let political associates do his dirty work while he kept his reputation for personal integrity.

  With reports circulating that influential mugwump Henry Ward Beecher was reassessing his support of Cleveland—which was more than a little ironic because Beecher himself had been caught up in an epic scandal involving a parishioner with whom he was intimately involved—Cleveland tapped Horatio King to keep Beecher from bolting. King was a friend of Beecher’s who was also a Cleveland political appointee; Cleveland had made him judge advocate general of the state Nat
ional Guard. King assured Beecher he would investigate the charges against Cleveland and headed to Buffalo to do “a little bit of detective work.” According to the Chicago Daily Tribune, King’s “investigation” consisted of “call[ing] on some of Gov. Cleveland’s friends.” When he returned to New York, he assured Beecher that Cleveland was “the victim of outrageous slander” and that “Cleveland’s character is as free from stain as the whitest lily.” He blamed the Reverend George Ball, who had first brought the story to the Evening Telegraph, asserting he was on the payroll of the Republicans.

  On August 8, King released the results of his “investigation” in a sensational New York World interview:

  The facts seem to be that many years ago when the governor was “sowing his wild oats,” he met this woman, with whom his name has been connected, and became intimate with her. She was a widow and not a good woman by any means. Mr. Cleveland, hearing this, began to make inquiries about her and discovered that two of his friends were intimate with her at the same time as himself.

  When a child was born, Cleveland, in order to shield his two friends, who were both married men, assumed the responsibility of it. He took care of the child and the mother like a man, and did everything in his power for them, and he provided for them until the woman became a confirmed victim of alcoholism and made it impossible by her conduct for him to have anything to do with her. He never separated the mother and child, nor did he do anything to injure the woman. He was throughout the affair a victim of circumstance. He accepted responsibilities that not one man in a thousand has shouldered and acted honorably in the matter.

  It was a devastating story that cut to the heart of contemporary assumptions about “bad” women and a man’s right to sow his wild oats. King was asserting that Maria had been simultaneously sexually active with Cleveland and two of his friends. King said that after the baby was born, Maria “made a habit of visiting every man with whom she had been intimate and demanded money.” According to King, Cleveland took responsibility to protect his married friends’ “hearthsides” from any “unpleasantness.” King had turned Cleveland from the villain who had abandoned the woman he impregnated into a hero protecting Victorian homes from a predatory woman.

  It strained credulity to believe that Cleveland had become intimate with Halpin only to find out afterward that she just happened to be sleeping with two of his friends. Furthermore, unlike the Telegraph and Journal stories about the scandal—which were corroborated by Maria’s neighbor Mrs. Baker; Minnie Kendell, the woman who cared for Oscar; Dr. William Ring, the doctor who attended her at the Providence Insane Asylum; M. A. Whitney, the lawyer Maria hired; and Messrs. Flint and Kent themselves, who confirmed that Maria was “much esteemed” and “bore an unblemished name” when she worked for them—King offered no proof of any of his assertions. He provided no names of the other men who were supposedly involved with Maria, other than to say that the likely father was “dead and the child is his perfect image in manner and looks”—in other words, Oscar Folsom. “It is perhaps worthy of note that Grover Cleveland is the only authority cited by Gen. King,” wrote an incredulous John Creswell, the editor of the Telegraph. “He does not let us know who told him that Gov. Cleveland is so close in his associations that he and two dear friends at the same time held relations with a woman who left the paternity of her children doubtful … he does not cite a witness to [make] the shameful allegations he makes against the mother of the son of Grover Cleveland.” King also never explained, as Maria herself would later note, how such a “vile wretch” as he portrayed her to be managed to fool everyone—her neighbors, employers, and fellow congregants at St. John’s—into thinking she was a respectable woman.

  Nonetheless, it made national headlines when Beecher proclaimed himself satisfied with King’s investigation. He declared the Halpin story “vile slander” and said that although Cleveland “committed an error,” he “acted a generous and very honorable part,” and Beecher said he would support him enthusiastically. Several days later, a New York Times headline proclaimed the charges had been “Swept Away” after two more thinly sourced “investigations” by pro-Cleveland loyalists determined that beyond the “primary offense” of an “illicit connection” with Halpin, Cleveland had acted “honorably.”

  The New York Mercury completed the smear when it published a story titled “Wicked Maria Halpin,” a largely fictional account of Maria’s life that recast the decorous salesclerk as the village siren. The article claimed she grew up “plump, pretty and decidedly attractive” and was “a magnetic girl” with a “free, jolly disposition,” who “attracted a large circle of admirers from the towns and villages around.” The article was riddled with biographical errors, including Maria’s maiden name, which was Hovenden, not Crofts; the claim that she was an orphan; and the number of children she had with her late husband. But that didn’t diminish its impact or its contribution to what was quickly becoming the accepted portrait of the “widow Halpin” who, proclaimed the Mercury, “Lured [Cleveland] from Virtue.”

  Maria tried to get her side of the story out, giving a brief statement to the Telegraph in which she asserted that Cleveland was Oscar’s father “and to say otherwise is infamous.” She called the attempt to link her to Folsom “cruel and cowardly,” and said she “had but a very slight acquaintance” with him. She said it didn’t seem possible “that an attempt would be made to blacken my name” after the years of “shame, suffering, and degradation forced upon me by Grover Cleveland.” But many papers didn’t run her statement—the New York Times never even referred to her by name.

  Maria herself had by mid-August gone into hiding, after being smuggled out of New Rochelle, New York, where she had been living with her aunt Harriet and her uncle James Seacord as a “quiet, decorous, unobtrusive housekeeper,” under cover of night and onto a train bound for New York City.

  Cleveland again pressured Maria’s family to intercede. In mid-August, Maria’s brother-in-law Simeon Talbott received a letter from Cleveland “urging [him] to make a statement showing that he had always treated Mrs. Halpin well” and promising, said Talbott, “anything I could wish in case he was elected.” Cleveland told Talbott that the “published reports in the press that two other men were intimate with Mrs. Halpin were wholly unauthorized by him, and were not true.” Talbott said Cleveland promised to have the record “corrected” if he would make “the required statement,” but this time he refused to play ball, saying he learned after Maria’s “trouble” that “Cleveland was a notorious libertine.” Talbott also said that the Democrats had offered Maria ten thousand dollars to make a statement exonerating Cleveland but that she “said she would die before she would make” such a statement. “She says she would rather tell the truth for the Republican cause than take any sum from the Democrats,” he said.

  In late September, Maria’s now-grown son Frederick was summoned to the Hoffman House in New York City, a favorite Democratic meeting place, by William C. Hudson, a former political reporter and Democratic operative who was close to Cleveland. Hudson, said Frederick, prepared a statement that he wanted Maria to sign asserting that she had received “uniform kindness and courtesy” from Cleveland and that she “always had a high esteem for Mr. Cleveland.” Frederick said Maria refused to sign the statement because it was “not true.”

  Despite a lack of a statement from Maria, by mid-September Cleveland felt the tide had turned in his favor. He wrote to his former law partner Wilson Shannon “Shan” Bissell on September 11 that “the scandal business is about wound up” and he thought “the matter was arranged in the best possible way.” At the end of the month, Maria officially became a laughingstock when she was made the subject of one of the most famous political cartoons in history: Frank Beard’s cartoon of Cleveland determinedly blocking his ears to baby Oscar’s wails of “I want my pa,” as Maria hides her face in shame. Soon Republicans all over the country were pushing baby carriages in political parades chanting, “Ma, ma, where’s m
y pa?” Maria’s personal nightmare had become the stuff of political farce.

  On October 22, Henry Beecher addressed a “vast audience” at the Brooklyn Rink and gave Cleveland his full-throated endorsement and bemoaned the “ghouls who have been scattering scandal,” blaming the Republican Party and “credulous clergymen” for listening to a “harlot and drunkard.” In a desperate last effort to expunge her reputation as a “harlot” as the election neared, Maria swore out and released two affidavits on October 28 and 29. She said she would “gladly remain silent” but felt she had a duty to her family and friends to make a public statement refuting the charges against her “character and actions.” Maria attested that her “life was as pure and spotless as that of any lady in the City of Buffalo” up until the time she met Cleveland. She defied Cleveland or his backers to “state a single fact or give a single incident or action of mine to which anyone could take exception.” She confirmed that the story of her ruin as published in the Telegraph was largely true and that there “never was a doubt as to the paternity of our child.”

  In her affidavit of October 28, Maria said that the “circumstances under which my ruin was accomplished are too revolting on the part of Grover Cleveland to be made public.” Apparently she changed her mind, because the following day she swore out a second affidavit in which she attested that Cleveland “accomplished my ruin by the use of force and violence and without my consent.” Maria’s accusation of rape received little press coverage. In fact, two days later the New York World, which was controlled by Cleveland ally Joseph Pulitzer, ran what it purported to be an interview with Maria in which she disavowed any statements against Cleveland and said he was a “good, plain, honest-hearted man, who was always friendly to me and used me kindly.” The language sounded much like the language in the statement Cleveland had repeatedly tried to get her to sign. Maria herself had said back in August, “Me make a statement exonerating Grover Cleveland? Never! I would rather put a bullet through my heart.”