A Secret Life: The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland

by Charles Lachman

  “The responsibility for this catastrophe indisputably rests on those who sent the Missouri to sea in the condition she was in,” the Times reported.

  It sounded like pure negligence on the part of the ship’s captain and the owner, the Atlantic Mail Steamship Company.

  It was distressing beyond words for the Cleveland family to read the account of suffering and panic on board. Mrs. Cleveland was said to be in a state of despair—a “stricken mother in her untold, unfathomable grief.” Perhaps the only solace for Grover and his family was the touching depiction of Cecil’s and Fred’s final moments. In the chaos and panic on board the Missouri, with the ship ablaze, Cecil and Fred were observed on deck assisting the terror-stricken passengers as the lifeboats were being lowered. “When the boats were filled, there was no room for them, and together they went down.” The Cleveland brothers died heroes.

  3

  MARIA

  MARIA HALPIN COULD see that she was losing her husband. His symptoms were chillingly recognizable to any woman of the 19th century: flushed cheeks, pale skin, fever, and swollen red eyes sensitive to bright light. Most of all, there was the bloody cough. He had tuberculosis. In Maria’s time, it was called consumption. With a mortality rate approaching 80 percent, more often than not, it was a death sentence.

  Consumption was a relentless fading-away of the patient. Perhaps because so many famous artists and poets died from it in the prime of their lives, in Maria’s time, the disease was romanticized; suffering from consumption had a hauntingly transcendent aura about it. The great composer Chopin died of tuberculosis at age thirty-nine, and the philosopher Henry David Thoreau succumbed at age forty-four. Emily Brontë, the author of Wuthering Heights, was dead at age thirty from consumption; her sister Charlotte Brontë followed her to the grave six years later, also from tuberculosis. In the final throes of the disease, women were said to be enchantingly alluring and men brilliantly lucid.

  Maria found nothing romantic about consumption. Frederick Halpin was clearly dying of it, and he was dying slowly. When her husband succumbed, in 1870, Maria was thirty years old. Her son Freddie was seven, and her daughter Ada just five.

  The Halpin family did what they could. For a time, Maria moved in with her in-laws, in Jersey City, New Jersey—never a perfect state of affairs for a young widow. The engraver Frederick Halpin was now seventy, and his wife, Elija, sixty-five. A widow like Maria was expected to remain in a period of deep mourning for a minimum of a year plus a day. Two of the best-known widows of the era, Queen Victoria and Mary Todd Lincoln, made a public spectacle of their deep mourning that went on for the rest of their lives. Of course Maria Halpin did not go to that extreme, but she did wear black, including a black crepe veil, and she followed the rituals and etiquette that were laid out in Godey’s Lady’s Book, the premier women’s magazine of the Gilded Age.

  With two children to feed, Maria found it necessary to look for a job. A woman working outside the home was becoming progressively widespread, mainly because the Civil War produced thousands of widows who were forced to support themselves and their children for the first time.

  Maria was hired by A. T. Stewart & Co. to work as a saleslady in the company’s flagship department store, the Iron Palace, on Broadway and 9th Street in New York City. Alexander Turney Stewart was an innovative Irish-born entrepreneur who had started in business as a bag boy. Later, assisted by a $5,000 inheritance from his grandfather, he became a wealthy merchant and, in 1862, opened the Iron Palace.

  Stewart focused on pleasing the lady customer of the carriage-trade class. His formula for building a successful retail store and encouraging repeat business was paying attention to the smallest details, offering his customers great deals, and connecting with them on a personal level. Hiring the right saleswomen was fundamental, and Maria, with a background in dressmaking and her natural gifts as a conversationalist, was eminently qualified. That she also spoke fluent French made her eminently qualified and then some.

  When Maria walked into the Iron Palace for the first time, the commotion she encountered jolted her. Two thousand men and women were employed there. It was Alexander Stewart’s showcase, the largest department store in the world, with eight floors of specialty shops—for silks, dresses, carpets, toys, furs, bedding, carpets, glass, china, even sports—nineteen departments in all. Unlike the brick or thick masonry of competing stores, the Iron Palace had a cast-iron façade. The innovative architecture allowed Stewart to open up the store to passersby with huge plate-glass windows, which also flooded the interior with natural light. Music came from an organ while the world’s first fashion models posed in the latest designs from Europe. It made going to Stewart’s an event.

  Less than a year had passed when Maria was faced with what must have been the hardest choice of her life.

  It so happened that a dry-goods store was opening in Buffalo, and through a Halpin family friend who was cofinancing the new venture, Maria was offered a sales position. Getting in on the ground floor of a good business was a once-in-a-lifetime prospect, a rare entrepreneurial opportunity for a woman in the 19th century. But it meant quitting her job at the Iron Palace, leaving her in-laws, and moving to another city.

  In 1871, Maria found herself on the train to Buffalo with but one of her children—little Freddie. She’d left her daughter behind with the Halpins in Jersey City, thinking that Ada would be happier staying with her grandparents until things got settled. The reality was that without a family support structure in place in Buffalo, Maria would have found it impossible to work full-time and take care of two little ones. Her quandary was not unlike that of any 21st-century woman struggling with the challenges posed by single motherhood.

  Maria and Freddie arrived in Buffalo like all newcomers to a strange city, a little awed and probably a touch terrified. The first order of business was finding a place to live. One of the best boardinghouses in the city was run by Mrs. J. C. Randall, at 39 Swan Street. Mark Twain, under his birth name, Samuel Clemens, had lived there in 1869 when he served as an editor of the Buffalo Express newspaper, whose office was conveniently located down the street at 14 East Swan. Maria found Mrs. Randall’s rooming house to be clean and respectable, and a chief benefit was the neighborhood. Next door stood the magnificent St. John’s Episcopal Church, the third oldest Episcopal congregation in Buffalo, cofounded by the businessman William Fargo. Maria joined the St. John’s community and was soon mingling with the finest and most prominent families in the city’s Protestant establishment.

  Maria struck anyone who encountered her in 1871 as someone special. One of her neighbors, Mrs. William Baker, took note of her “remarkable beauty and rare accomplishments,” adding that she was, “beyond suspicion.” Maria’s knowledge of French gave her an exotic air of sophistication that certain men in Buffalo apparently found enticing. Later, her fluency in the language would come back to haunt her in the court of public opinion.

  Of those early days in Buffalo Maria would later say that her personal character was “pure and spotless.” Mrs. Baker was awed by Maria’s special gifts. She could talk to the most educated man or woman in Buffalo and come across as clever, but genuine. She was a born saleswoman. Pushed to say something provocative about her, Mrs. Baker finally acknowledged that her friend was deficient in one quarter—she was a “bad housekeeper.”

  When Maria came to live in Buffalo, even though her period of deep mourning for her husband, with its rigid requirements, had passed, she was still wearing widow’s black. She now entered the next stipulated stage of widowhood—half mourning; that meant she was no longer wearing a veil. Nor was she limited to wearing all black; patterned fabrics and dark colors such as gray, mauve, violet, and lavender were permissible, as long as black was included.

  In the early 1870s when Maria moved to Buffalo, it was a city of contrasts—flourishing but vulnerable, thriving yet paradoxically fighting for survival.

  Canal Street, running parallel to the Erie Canal, was known as the �
��wickedest street in America,” with a reputation for vice and debauchery unmatched in America. Across the oceans, in the waterfront saloons of far-flung ports of call, when Buffalo came up in conversation, the question was always the same: “Is it true what they say about Canal Street?” Even the good citizens of Buffalo who brimmed with civic pride took to calling Canal Street “the Infected District.”

  There were ninety-three saloons on Canal Street alone, serving their rotgut liquor, and 60 percent of the buildings housed brothels. A certain social pecking order defined the prostitutes: Women working Canal Street regarded themselves as upmarket “ladies of the evening,” a cut above those who walked the towpath alongside the Erie Canal—these ladies were deemed to be “dirty whores.” Buffalo’s prostitutes wore Mother Hubbard dresses—which, with their long sleeves and high neck, covered as much skin as possible—with nothing underneath. The garment had once symbolized girlish innocence; now a woman wearing a Mother Hubbard dress on Canal Street was immediately identified as a hooker.

  Life was cheap on Buffalo’s waterfront. It was so dangerous that no cop dared patrol it alone; police went out in squads of three—one up front and two covering his back. Street brawls were constant. Great Lakes sailors spoiling for a fight were hostile to the “canawlers” who plied the Erie Canal, and vice versa. One sea captain compared Canal Street to the violent mining towns of the Wild West, only worse.

  “Bring out your dead,” came the call each morning as death carts went up and down the waterfront collecting the departed. Bodies would be loaded onto the wheelbarrows and lugged to Buffalo police headquarters, where the remains would be thrown down a chute, worn smooth from constant use.

  The Erie County Jail, run by Sheriff Grover Cleveland, was reputed to be one of the harshest jails in America. Years later, when the writer Jack London was eighteen years old, down and out, and passing through Buffalo, he was jailed for vagrancy. The thirty days he served in the Erie County Jail left London a lifetime of painful memories.

  On his first day in jail, young Jack London found his bunk alive with bedbugs, hundreds of them, so brazen that they were swarming over his cell in broad daylight. Dinner that night was a hunk of bread and soup—hot water and a “lonely drop of grease” floating on the surface. London, rather than eat the bread, chewed it into the consistency of putty and used it to cork the crevices between the bricks where the bedbugs teemed. He worked at it for several hours and would not quit until he’d plugged every cranny. He asked a guard how he could go about arranging for a lawyer; the guard burst out laughing. A decade before he found fame as the author of The Call of the Wild, Jack London saw things in that jail that he called “unbelievable and monstrous.”

  Vice found new expressions in Buffalo: The Only Theater at Canal and Commerce Streets was infamous for its exhibition of orgiastic sex. Prostitutes sat on the laps of the sailors who filled the concert hall every Sunday, and in full view of everyone, lifted their Mother Hubbards to expose a “bare posterior,” and the men pumped away.

  Crime was seasonal and was generally rooted in desperation rather than passion. Murder rates peaked in December, when the Erie Canal froze over and men were out of work; they were at their lowest in July, when everyone was busy and money flowed.

  Disease was omnipresent. Cholera was the scourge of the age, and periodic epidemics of it hit Buffalo like the outbreak of a war. The first symptom appeared as diarrhea; it was followed within one to four hours by complete physical collapse. In the most severe cases, the patient would be dead by the end of the day. Cholera could afflict anyone, even the daughter of a former United States president. Mary Abigail Fillmore died of it at age twenty-two during the epidemic of 1854. Buffalo’s doctors, like physicians everywhere, were at a loss as to what to do. They advised citizens to eat their vegetables, promoted cleanliness in the streets, and urged everyone to become more hygienic in their personal habits at home.

  Buffalo’s streets were filthy. At the rear of the horse stables on Erie Street, manure was piled forty feet high, alive with swarms of flies and mosquitoes and the movement of a million maggots feeding on it.

  The Fourth of July was a day the city went a little crazy. The festivities would begin on the second and not end until the fifth. Revelers would get so drop-dead drunk they would have to be hauled by their feet into the back rooms of saloons and laid out side by side until they sobered up. And it wasn’t just on the waterfront. During one July 4 fireworks celebration, a rocket hit the steeple at St. John’s Episcopal Church, where Maria now worshipped, and set it ablaze. Fortunately, the loss was covered by insurance, and St. John’s was rebuilt.

  When Maria and her son settled in Buffalo, its population had more than doubled since Grover Cleveland had arrived as a teenager two decades earlier. It was the third largest city in the state, after New York City and Albany and, nationally, ranked below San Francisco, then the tenth largest city in America.

  Buffalo simmered with tension. Protestants dominated the legal, medical, and business professions. Their newspaper of record was the Commercial Advertiser, which once conveyed concern about the city’s immigrant poor, whether they could survive the harsh Buffalo winter to come, with the words, “What shall be done with these poor creatures,” before condescendingly pointing out that after all, immigrants required plenty of help because their “reasoning and moral faculties are limited.” The paternalism and arrogance of the ruling class was also communicated by that other mouthpiece of the Protestant establishment, the Buffalo Express, which disdainfully suggested that Catholics might want to consider spending less money on their churches, for if they did, perhaps they could manage to feed their hungry.

  The Irish who were employed as unskilled laborers on the waterfront lived mainly in the first ward, on the city’s south side, close to the terminus of the Erie Canal. Their voices were heard in the pages of the Catholic Sentinel, which proclaimed the Irish American’s respect for law and order while noting that an empty stomach can sometimes drive reason away. German immigrants resided in small-framed houses on the east side, in the fifth, sixth, and seventh wards, where the principal language spoken was the mother tongue. These German Americans were the tradesmen of the city—shoemakers, tailors, blacksmiths, butchers, clockmakers, and bakers. Racially, Buffalo was strictly segregated: A small community of black people lived east of Main Street; there were two black churches, and prior to the Civil War, blacks were required to send their children to a special “African School.”

  Severe winter weather made Buffalo an uninviting place for many newcomers. In the summer, the daily struggle of life eased up. For relaxation, families attended church bazaars and cruised Lake Erie or took in the natural splendor of the 350-acre parkland designed by the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, fresh from his triumph of creating Central Park in New York City. Of course, there was also Niagara Falls, straddling the U.S.-Canadian border, and already a popular destination for honeymooners. There was no public library system, but the Young Men’s Association maintained a library of twenty thousand volumes available to all.

  Entrepreneurs were making fortunes. Jewett and Root’s Stove Factory employed more than two hundred men, the Buffalo Iron and Nail Works manufactured fifteen thousand pounds of nails a day, and Ketchum’s Mowing Machine produced the nation’s first mechanical lawn mower.

  Mansion Row along Delaware Avenue was the location of the city’s most magnificent residences. There, shaded by towering elms and great stretches of lawns, lived the elite. At the top of the social pyramid stood Millard Fillmore. His gothic mansion at No. 52 was a residence so immense that upon his death, in 1874, it was combined with another mansion and converted into a hotel.

  Buffalo was the preeminent inland port in America, a key hub for pioneers heading west, and, from the other direction, shipping wheat east to New York City and beyond, to the great capitals of Europe. In this regard, Buffalo was indispensable to national commerce. And yet, with all this trade, the city was vulnerable
and stood on the razor’s edge of obsolescence. Unforgiving winters meant frozen lakes and the end of marine traffic until the spring thaw. The Erie Canal—the source of the city’s prosperity—was slow and inefficient when measured against the locomotive. Those with foresight were already aware that the city had a gun pointed at its heart.

  In the beginning, Maria Halpin had a rough time of it. The new store that had brought her to Buffalo failed, and she now found herself looking for work. Main Street was the prime shopping district in the city, and one store in particular, Flint & Kent, drew most of the carriage-trade class; this is where Maria found her first real job in Buffalo. The store had been founded in 1832, selling wholesale dry goods at 188 Main Street. By 1871, it had moved to a more desirable location up the block at 261 Main Street.

  With Maria’s sales experience at the celebrated Iron Palace in New York City, Flint & Kent was a natural place of employment for her. The store sold only first-class merchandise that appealed to the well-to-do customer and was recognized for its ambiance of decorum and courteous hospitality. About thirty people worked there when Maria was hired. In no time, she came to realize that the store was a place where the city’s elite came not just to shop but also to socialize.

  The busiest time of day at Flint & Kent was the period called the “proper hours,” between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. Any shopping before or after was considered vulgar. Gloves were a big sale items, along with hosiery, underwear, elegant plaids, damask napkins, and Irish poplin wraps in all the best makes. In those days, the business of ready-to-wear clothing, mass-produced in predetermined sizes, was still in its infancy. Most women made their clothes at home from patterns, which they copied from Godey’s Lady’s Book. Or a customer could buy fabric from a bolt and take it to her own dressmaker.

  The founding partner, William Flint, lived on Mansion Row, at 600 Delaware Avenue, and was sixty-five when Maria was hired. Flint’s background was unremarkable; he’d clerked in a little general store in New Hampshire and at age forty moved to Buffalo, where he achieved success as a merchant prince. Modest, and with a reputation for unimpeachable integrity, Flint was the perfect partner. He preferred a low profile, content to keep the books in the office and leave the glamorous sales operation to Henry M. Kent.