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

by Charles Lachman

  Once when Cleveland’s sister Susan Cleveland Yeomans was nagging her bachelor brother, she asked him whether he had ever thought of getting married.

  “A good many times,” Cleveland said, “and the more I think of it, the more I think I’ll not do it.” Susan did not find his answer amusing.

  Several years passed, and during another conversation with her brother, Susan again pressed him on the subject of marriage. Would he ever consider it? She really wanted to know. This time Cleveland had a different response.

  “I’m only waiting for my wife to grow up,” he told her. At the time, it seemed an off-the-cuff dodge, which, though a little creepy, was not to be taken seriously. One wonders how Susan would have responded had she realized that Grover was not teasing; he was speaking the literal truth.

  Frances was seven when Cleveland became sheriff, and ten years old when he returned to private practice. Tall for her age, she was an agile and healthy child with a generous personality, and she shared her father’s enthusiasm for sports. Frances preferred the name Frank, though once it caused confusion on the school roster when she was misidentified as a boy. On that occasion, she grudgingly consented to being called Frances. She spent her summers at her father’s family farm in Folsomville, her favorite place in the world. It was a happy home.

  Maria Halpin was doing well in Buffalo. After her bosses at Flint & Kent had started her off making shirt collars, they’d realized her worth and promoted her to head of the cloak department. She also had a wide circle of fashionable friends, mainly through her affiliation with St. John’s Episcopal Church; and after two years in Buffalo, she seemed content with her new life.

  On December 15, 1873, all around Buffalo, friends were getting together to celebrate the Christmas holiday season. On this evening, Maria, still living with her son Freddie in rented rooms at Mrs. Randall’s boardinghouse, had been invited to a birthday party for a friend, Mrs. Johnson. She left her apartment and was walking down Swan Street when she ran into Grover Cleveland, who lived just a block and a half away. In those days, Cleveland was always correct in his dress, in the office and out, which meant he was almost certainly wearing black broadcloth and a top hat. They exchanged friendly greetings. Cleveland had been courting her for several months now, and it was obvious that he was interested in getting to know her better. Physically, they looked good together. Cleveland was thirty-seven; Maria was a year younger. The bulk on Cleveland’s six-foot frame projected a figure of unusual might and virility. Maria was a worthy complement to an outsized man like Cleveland. She had matured into her beauty, with a cascade of dark hair set against pale skin, a rounded chin, and a mouth cut into a seductive arc. And her robust figure harmonized perfectly with Cleveland’s body type.

  Maria explained that she was on her way downtown to Mrs. Johnson’s birthday party at the Tifft House. The Tifft House on Main Street was the city’s finest hotel, with two hundred spacious rooms and a first-class bar with a choice selection of wines and liquors. In the year 1873, in Buffalo, it was unrivaled for grandeur and handsome accommodations. The Tifft House was also like a second home to Cleveland. There he presided over the “seven bachelors’ table,” the corner power table that looked out over the entire dining room, surrounded by other prominent bachelors, including Powers Fillmore, the eccentric son of the former president.

  Now, still chatting on the street, Cleveland invited Maria out to dinner. She could not possibly, Maria responded, saying that Mrs. Johnson and the other guests were waiting for her. Cleveland refused to take no for an answer and suggested that they head off to the Ocean Dining Hall & Oyster House, a popular restaurant that had opened the year before down the block at No. 11 West Swan Street. He was “persistent,” “urging” her to accompany him, and obviously persuasive. Maria decided to forget about Mrs. Johnson’s birthday party and go to dinner with Cleveland.

  Their meal together must have been a pleasant one. The Ocean Dining Hall was popular with Buffalo’s business community and local politicos. It had an extensive wine list and offered an assortment of English ales and porter and domestic and imported cigars. The he-man menu was a pure Grover Cleveland bill of fare: green turtle soup, oysters in the shell for 20¢, little neck clams, scallops, and sirloin steak for 50¢. For greens, it was just the basics: radishes, lettuce, and green peas.

  After dinner Maria and Cleveland walked back to Mrs. Randall’s rooming house. On past social occasions, Maria acknowledged, Cleveland had “frequently” escorted her to her apartment, so he was also aware that her son Freddie, now ten years old, “lived with me.”

  What happened next, Maria said, came as a complete shock. Once they were alone in her apartment, Cleveland got on top of her and, she claimed, “by use of force and violence and without my consent” had intercourse with her.

  “Up to that hour my life was as pure and spotless as that of any lady in the city of Buffalo,” Maria said. There was not the “slightest shadow of suspicion over me.”

  Now, she said, she was a “ruined” woman.

  When Cleveland was finished with her—in Maria’s arched words, “after he had accomplished his purpose”—she apparently threatened to report his crime to the police. Cleveland went into a rage.

  “He told me that he was determined to ruin me if it cost him $10,000, if he was hanged by the neck for it. I then and there told him that I never wanted to see him again and would never see him and commanded him to leave my rooms, which he did.”

  As a lawyer and former assistant district attorney, of all people, Cleveland would have appreciated how improbable it would be for him to ever face criminal charges. In the 19th century, a woman claiming rape faced extraordinary challenges in bringing her assailant to justice.

  No case so vividly laid out the issues as the attempted rape of a woman outside Eureka, California, in 1874.

  Julie Dow was riding a horse on a public road with her sister-in-law when they came upon a scoundrel named F. A. Brown. This lowlife started following them, and Mrs. Dow kicked the horse into a gallop. At some point, the animal, carrying the two women on its back, became exhausted, and Mrs. Dow had to climb off and walk beside it. Seizing the moment, Brown grabbed Mrs. Dow and wrestled her to the ground. There was a fierce struggle. Mrs. Dow’s sister-in-law came to her aid, “clobbering” Brown with a stick, to no avail. Brown pulled Mrs. Dow’s drawers down to her knees and forced her legs apart. Then he pulled out his private parts. When Mrs. Dow’s sister-in-law ran screaming for assistance to a nearby farmhouse, Brown finally climbed off the victim without having completed the act.

  A Humboldt County jury convicted Brown of assault with intent to rape. Justice seemed served, but on appeal, the California supreme court overturned the verdict. Mrs. Dow was a “large, young, vigorous woman,” the court found. There had been “no violent struggle.” Mrs. Dow had dismounted her horse voluntarily, and during the thirty-minute struggle, Brown said not a word to her and made “no threats of bodily harm.” Mrs. Dow failed to resist to the utmost of her ability, and consequently, she was inviting Brown to persist in his conquest of her. The court said that Brown did not commit attempted rape: “It was an act of “seduction.” And Mrs. Dow, by climbing off the horse and failing to resist Brown’s advances to the utmost of her ability, showed herself to be, in the words of Brown’s defense lawyer, a woman of “easy virtue.”

  The presumption in the 19th century was that a woman who truly wanted to preserve her honor could repel any rape, unless it was a gang rape. She could use her hands or draw back her legs and physically thwart the insertion of a man’s penis into her body. If the act of sex was consummated during rape, it was because the woman “did not earnestly resist it.”

  Another rape case that received attention illustrated the prevailing view in 1870s America. Twenty-year-old Orilla Vincent was employed as a maid in Vermont when a neighbor, John Hartigan, came to the door on a Sunday morning when the family Orilla worked for was at church. Hartigan forced Orilla into the pantry and got
her on the floor. She testified she could not cry out because Hartigan was pressing his mouth against hers. She tried to fight him off, but he pinned down her arms and raped her. When he was finished, Hartigan told Orilla that if she would not speak a word about the rape, he would give her a silk wrap. Orilla refused the offer, and Hartigan tossed a 25¢ piece at her feet and ran off. When Orilla’s employer, Mrs. Rockwell, came home from church, she found clear evidence of a vicious assault: bruises all over her maid’s body and hand imprints on her arms where Hartigan had held her down. Orilla also turned over to Mrs. Rockwell the 25¢ Hartigan had thrown at her.

  It seemed to be a straightforward case of rape. Yet Hartigan was not convicted of rape, but of the lesser charge of assault with intent to rape. The jury found that when Hartigan had taken hold of the maid by force, at first she had resisted; but then she “ultimately yielded” to having sexual intercourse with the defendant.

  According to the customs of the time, it was fine for a man with normal biological urges to use a “certain degree of violence” when engaging in sex. As the law saw it, even if the woman put up a struggle, that was foreplay.

  The circumstances surrounding Cleveland’s alleged assault on Maria made it highly unlikely that she would file charges against him.

  For one thing, Maria had accepted Cleveland’s invitation to dinner—tendered on a city street as she was on her way to a birthday party. That would not have been deemed the conduct of a chaste woman. Then she had permitted Cleveland to escort her to her rooms, which certainly would have portrayed her as a woman of questionable morality whose purpose in doing so was to encourage his base desires. The legal doctrine of utmost resistance meant that to prove rape, Maria would have to show that she had tried to fend off her attacker to the “fullest extent of her abilities,” which would require more than her sworn testimony. There had to be physical evidence of a fierce struggle. As far as we know, Maria had no black eye, cuts, or bruises, or any other conspicuous evidence of having been violently assaulted. The law would have presumed that even if she had resisted Cleveland’s aggressive conduct, the consummation of sex was evidence that, in the end, she had willingly surrendered to her ravishment. And consent—even partial consent—meant that, under the law, she had not been raped.

  There was another important factor for Maria to consider. As the former sheriff of Erie County, Cleveland would undoubtedly have had the connections to crush or derail any official investigation.

  Six weeks after the assault, Maria became aware that she was pregnant.

  Being pregnant and unmarried in the 19th century did not give her many options. She was now a fallen woman. To induce abortion, she could swallow poison or overdose on herbs and such plants as snakeroot, cohosh, or tansy. Surgery was an alternative, but society viewed it as a crime against God and nature—the “evil of the age,” as The New York Times put it. Maria ruled out telling her father, the retired police officer Robert Hovenden, who still lived in Brooklyn. She was determined to keep the knowledge of her “shame,” as she put it, from him and also from her sisters. More likely than not, the Hovenden family would have disowned her. She was in this alone.

  Since the night of December 15, Maria and Cleveland had gone their separate ways. She had not spoken to or tried in any way to communicate with Cleveland. But then her “condition” made it “necessary for me to send for him . . . to inform him of the consequences of his actions.” She was determined to deal with Grover Cleveland directly—“he being the proper person to whom I could tell my trouble.”

  Maria wrote Cleveland a note demanding that he come see her at Mrs. Randall’s. When he arrived at her rooms, Maria was in “despair,” and laid everything out: She told him she was pregnant, and insisted that he marry her.

  Cleveland must have realized he was facing the worst jam of his life. He was apoplectic.

  “What the devil are you blubbering about? You act like a baby without teeth.”

  When Cleveland had calmed down and considered everything Maria was saying, he accepted some of the responsibility. According to Maria, Cleveland “told me that he would do everything which was honorable and righteous” and “promised that he would marry me.” Cleveland would later deny he said any such thing.

  For the next several weeks, Maria seemed at peace. She truly believed that Cleveland was going to become her husband and their child would be born legitimate. He even supported her with small stipends. For a time, there was the illusion of a family coming together. But Cleveland hemmed and hawed. Maria sent her son Freddie to Jersey City to stay with her in-laws. Then, by mutual agreement with her bosses, she resigned from her job at Flint & Kent. The idea of standing behind the counter with her growing belly was unthinkable; it would be the talk of the town. Now was the time to disappear.

  Maria gave up her apartment at Mrs. Randall’s boardinghouse and moved into rooms at 11 East Genesee Street, five blocks north of Cleveland’s apartment. There she met Mrs. William Baker, who lived on the same floor. Mrs. Baker was impressed with Maria, finding her “ladylike and intelligent”; she became a trusted confidante—and an eyewitness to the drama that would follow. During those long afternoons as winter turned to spring and Maria awaited the birth of her third child, she and Mrs. Baker talked endlessly. Maria unburdened her heart to her new neighbor. She told Mrs. Baker plenty, but not everything.

  “Was she there at Mr. Cleveland’s expense?” Mrs. Baker was asked years later. In other words, was Cleveland paying the rent?

  “Well, she wouldn’t say,” Mrs. Baker replied.

  Maria also sought the counsel of her church. Reverend Charles Avery, her pastor at St. John’s Episcopal Church, had a genial smile and a kindly manner. He had taken over St. John’s just the year before, on Easter Sunday 1872. In his first sermon following his installation, Avery thoughtfully informed the three hundred families who made up his congregation, “I cannot ask your love in advance, but only that you will allow me to hope I may win it, which I fear I never can.” Avery came from the small village of Fredonia in Chautauqua County, so Buffalo was a huge step up for him, though he came to understand that making the case for temperance in the big city was a daunting challenge. Not surprising, given that Buffalo’s mayor at the time also owned the city’s largest malting center.

  When Maria went to see Avery, she told him she was pregnant and that Grover Cleveland was the father. He was shocked. Scandal had come to his church. Listening to every detail of what he later called the “circumstances of her intimacy” with the former sheriff of Erie County, Avery’s response was immediate and authoritative.

  “He must marry you,” he told Maria.

  That was what Maria had hoped he would say.

  The young minister did not know Cleveland, but his law partner was a parishioner of St. John’s, so there was that connection. Avery reached out to Cleveland, and when they met, the hulking lawyer “acknowledged his fault” and said he would be willing to make financial provisions for Maria. Man to man, however, he told the minister that he was uncertain whether he was the father of the unborn child. It could be his. Or it could one of the other men Maria was having relations with. That, at least, was how Cleveland saw it. According to Cleveland, Maria had fixed on him because he was the only bachelor among her paramours; the others involved in the “scrape” were all married.

  Assailing Maria’s morals clearly resonated with the minister; Avery emerged from the meeting agreeing with Cleveland that marriage would be “impossible.” “Doubtful paternity” had reversed Avery’s decision.

  Later, he explained his reasoning. “I do not wish to palliate his offense, but I must say that I think he did nobly, far more than most men would have done under the circumstances. I am of the belief that when a man acknowledges an error, and does everything in his power to atone for it, he is entitled to forgiveness and respect. If it were not so, what kind of a world would this be?”

  Now Maria came to the realization that it was over with Cleveland. There was no
chance of a wedding. The impending birth of her child put her in a state of depression mixed with intense anxiety. Meanwhile, Cleveland made arrangements. He approached the city’s premier obstetrician, Dr. James E. King, who agreed to attend Maria at the delivery.

  The child was born September 14, 1874, at Buffalo’s only hospital for unwed mothers, St. Mary’s Lying-In Hospital, and he was named Oscar Folsom Cleveland, after Cleveland’s best friend.

  “Mr. Cleveland wanted him to have that name,” said Mrs. Baker.

  As Maria recovered from the physical ordeal of giving birth, a plan was hatched. Dr. King had a sister-in-law by marriage, Minnie Kendall, who lived with her husband, William Kendall, in a grungy apartment in East Buffalo near the stockyards. Dr. King had decided he would hire Minnie to take care of the newborn, and as she was about to give birth herself, she would also be the wet nurse.

  Two days after Oscar was born, Dr. King arrived at the Kendalls’ apartment carrying the baby in his arms. Dr. King said he had come directly from the hospital to make an arrangement with Mrs. Kendall and leave the baby with her.

  Minnie Kendall’s antennae went up; something about the whole business was putting her on edge. The sore on the top of the baby’s head was also troubling.

  “I don’t want to take it,” she said.

  Dr. King was adamant. He was expecting the Kendalls to take the baby. When she asked the baby’s name, “They told me to call him Jack,” Mrs. Kendall said. Dr. King gathered the blanket and all the baby clothes monogrammed with the initials “M. H.” or the full name “Maria Halpin” and said the Kendalls had to replace everything. He also told them never to speak about this day again.

  Twelve days later, Mrs. Kendall gave birth to her son, William Harrison Kendall.