In Albany, Edgar K. Apgar was following the reports out of Buffalo with genuine curiosity. The Yale-educated Apgar was a leading Democratic political operative and the deputy treasurer of New York State. With shoulders so slender he looked like a boy, the forty-year-old made an improbable political boss. He weighed just one hundred pounds, ate two meals a day, and shunned sleep. “I shrink from it every time with just the same reluctance you would feel in surrendering yourself to the influence of ether in a dentist’s chair,” he once said. Until the end of his brief time on earth, he was cursed with a malfunctioning digestive system that one friend said left him at the mercy of a “capricious stomach.”
Apgar read all the state’s major dailies to keep on top of local political developments. He saw how the street-cleaning contract in Buffalo was erupting into a major scandal that was galvanizing the citizenry of Buffalo. He followed every aspect of it. One day, he went to see his friend Daniel S. Lamont, the chief clerk of the New York State Department of State. Like Apgar, Lamont was a young functionary who served on the Democratic Party’s central committee. Apgar asked Lamont if he knew of a “Grover Cleveland of Buffalo.” Lamont answered that he did not. Apgar said this Cleveland was the new mayor of Buffalo, and his intuition was telling him that Cleveland was someone worth considering for statewide office. An “ugly-honest man,” Apgar called him, with “undaunted courage.” Apgar even wondered whether Cleveland would make a dark-horse candidate for governor in the election of 1882, which was just around the corner.
Apgar told Lamont that he was going to start paying careful attention to Grover Cleveland.
The next few weeks were electrifying. Apgar found himself consumed with the news out of Buffalo. Grover Cleveland was averaging two or three vetoes a week! Whenever he had to go out of town on state business, Apgar made sure his staff saved the Buffalo newspapers, and on his return, he voraciously consumed the stack of back issues.
Finally, on August 23, Apgar took the plunge. He wrote a letter to Cleveland, introducing himself and saying he had a matter to bring up that was perhaps presumptuous but of vital importance to Cleveland’s political future. “I deem it right, though I have not the honor of your personal acquaintance, to place before you some suggestions which seem to me worthy of your consideration,” Apgar wrote.
The condition of the Democratic Party, he informed Cleveland, was bleak. The party had lost the confidence of the people. It had “abandoned its principles and made dishonest alliances for the sake of temporary success, which even in most cases it has failed to secure.” Apgar asked Cleveland to come to Albany and meet with Daniel Manning, chairman of the Democratic state committee.
“Men come here daily from all parts of the state—active, earnest and influential men. They come not to receive orders from a boss but to consult one whom they look upon as representing their views,” Apgar told Cleveland. An alliance between Manning and Cleveland, Apgar said, would guarantee Cleveland the gubernatorial nomination on the first ballot at the state convention coming up in Syracuse in two months.
When he read Apgar’s letter, Grover Cleveland was intrigued. He had returned to Buffalo after burying his mother to find his political allies in a state of exhilaration and the editorial pages of the Democratic newspapers in the city urging him to run for governor. Cleveland wrote his response to Apgar on August 29.
“I am gratified with the interest you take in my candidacy... . You are quite right in believing that I am not actively seeking the nomination for governor. The efforts of my friends and neighbors in that direction were begun in my absence from the city.” While he found the attention to be “extremely pleasant,” Cleveland said he would regrettably have to decline meeting with Manning in Albany. It would be impossible to keep such a get-together private, Cleveland explained, and a Cleveland-Manning sit-down would inevitably lead to stories that “an understanding had been arrived at between us, and pledges which make me his man.” The Cleveland boom, such as it was, hinged on his reputation as a reformer of uncompromising integrity. He could not be labeled as another politician angling for higher office.
Apgar read Cleveland’s response in his office in Albany. It was written on gray paper in purple ink. Cleveland’s handwriting was small and delicate, surprisingly feminine for such a burly drinking man. An hour after opening the letter, Apgar showed it to another cunning Democratic Party operative, William Gorham Rice. Rice studied it and asked Apgar what he thought. Apgar had to admit that it was disappointing. Cleveland was not going to publicly declare. But as Apgar thought it through some more, he came to understand the shrewdness of Cleveland’s position. He was more convinced than ever: Here was a new type of politician he had been searching for—“a man for the hour.”
Back in Buffalo, Cleveland, with a wink and a nod, set to work marshalling his forces. He was in his office at City Hall when he sent word that he wanted to see the comptroller. Timothy Mahoney bounded upstairs to the mayor’s office, where Cleveland laid out the plan for his old neighborhood sidekick.
“Captain Tim, I want to be the Democratic candidate for governor this fall. I’d like your help.”
“You’ve already got it,” Mahoney answered.
“I understand that you are prominent in the Catholic Mutual Benefit Association?” The CMBA was a fraternal organization composed mainly of Irish Americans, and loosely modeled on the Freemasons.
“That’s right,” Mahoney said. He was the supreme vice president.
“Some of its members in this part of the state are prominent in the Democratic Party and are delegates to state conventions?”
“They are,” agreed Mahoney.
“I’ll have Erie County solid for me, of course. But other counties around here will have to be rounded up. Would you write your fraternal friends and—”
“I’ll do that, and better,” Mahoney said. “I’ll have them call on you at City Hall, and you can talk to them face-to-face.”
Over the next three weeks, Cleveland quietly drummed up support. Thanks to Mahoney’s lobbying efforts, he won pledges from sixty-six delegates, most of them Irish Americans from Buffalo and Rochester affiliated with the Catholic Mutual Benefit Association. Western New York was an isolated region that had a long history of political inferiority because no United States senator and only one governor had ever been elected from there. Western New York delegates rallied around Cleveland as their favorite son.
It would take 193 delegates to win the nomination. The front-runners were Congressman Roswell P. Flower of upstate Watertown and Major General Henry W. Slocum of Brooklyn. Slocum was a by-the-book military commander ridiculed for indecision at the Battle of Gettysburg, where he had earned the insulting epithet “General Slow Come.” Flower and Slocum could count on 100 delegates each. Snubbed by Cleveland, state party chairman Daniel Manning had thrown his support behind Slocum. In the Byzantine world of New York politics, Manhattan Democrats were split between reformers and Tammany Hall. The reformers backed Flower, even though Cleveland in theory would seem a natural partner. Tammany Hall, under the domination of Boss Jim Kelly, who had taken leadership after the incarceration of the notorious Boss Tweed, was noncommittal. Strategically, Boss Kelly was determined to serve as kingmaker at the convention. He was playing the waiting game.
Cleveland’s candidacy was front-page news in Buffalo and other cities in Western New York, but downstate he was essentially ignored. As The New York Times dispatch put it, “Only one candidate is mentioned who resides West of Albany, and that is Mayor Cleveland of Buffalo.... No one here expresses any confidence in his nomination.”
William C. Hudson, a reporter who covered state politics for The Brooklyn Eagle under the pen name Seacoal, was sent to Buffalo to evaluate the candidate. Hudson was the kind of correspondent who always knew more than what he reported. That discretion earned him access because politicians could rely on Hudson never to publish anything they didn’t want to see in print. As a journalist once said of Hudson, “Deposits placed in his
mind were as safe as those made in a bank, and more safe, because they were never, even indirectly, put into circulation.”
Charley McCune, the owner of the Courier, escorted Hudson to Cleveland’s law office, where the reporter was introduced to the dark-horse candidate for governor. Wilson Bissell was also present. Everyone knew that Hudson was a plugged-in guy. They also suspected that as the representative of The Brooklyn Eagle, he was a Slocum man. But Hudson surprised everyone in the room when he said he thought Cleveland had a decent shot at the nomination, provided he stayed “aloof ” from the internecine divisions tearing the party apart. The smartest move for Cleveland was to sit back and wait until the “inevitable break,” at which point the entire convention would rally around him.
Cleveland listened more than he spoke. It just so happened that Hudson’s tactic fit his own, so the two men clicked. He asked Hudson to join him for a carriage ride the next day when they could talk some more.
Cleveland sounded glum about his chances when he and Hudson were alone in the carriage the following afternoon.
Hudson begged to differ. “Mr. Cleveland, you will be the nominee. I can see no other outcome of the situation.”
Cleveland wasn’t buying it. He tried to explain how he had found himself in this fix. “Sometime ago,” he told Hudson, “my mother was taken seriously ill. She is dead now. I was sent for. Laying everything aside, I hastened to her and remained with her to the end. When all was over and she was laid away, I returned to Buffalo to find that in my absence the boys had started a campaign for me for governor. It had such an impetus that it was difficult to stop it.” Then Cleveland surprised Hudson by saying he had very little interest in serving as governor. His experience as mayor of Buffalo, he said, “has not put me in love with executive administration.”
His true ambition, he confided to Hudson, was to be named a state supreme court justice.
Hudson pondered everything Cleveland had to say. “Well, Mr. Mayor,” he said, “when a man plunges into the political stream, he soon becomes subject to its current.”
Two nights before the opening of the convention, Daniel Manning’s brother John paid an unexpected call on Cleveland at City Hall. John Manning owned four breweries in Buffalo, so he had clout in town. He came as an emissary from his brother, the state party chairman. In his talk with Cleveland, he used the word treachery without directly accusing Cleveland. But the insinuation was in the air. There was no way Cleveland could prevail, John Manning informed the mayor. Slocum was too famous and Flower too rich. Why not settle for the nomination of a congressman-at-large from New York State?
Cleveland just sat there. But the moment Manning left his office, Cleveland hurriedly wrote a letter to his law partner, Wilson Bissell, who was already in Syracuse at the state convention corralling delegates. It was one in the morning.
“John B. Manning has been in to see me tonight,” Cleveland reported. “Now do just as I tell you without asking any questions.” He instructed Bissell to track down Daniel Lockwood and Samuel Scheu—Cleveland’s floor managers—and have them find Daniel Manning in Syracuse and “urge with the utmost vehemence my nomination.
“Never mind what he says—have them pound away.” It had to be drilled into Manning’s head that Cleveland was unswerving, and that he was not going to be “placated” with a run for Congress.
Meanwhile, the Cleveland forces, such as they were, gathered in Syracuse. Tim Mahoney, accompanied by a brawny aide, pulled into the train depot carrying armloads of Grover Cleveland lithographs, which were distributed to all the delegates, to the derision of a New York Tribune correspondent, who reported that the posters were causing “considerable merriment.” It was all a big joke to the sophisticates from downstate.
But Mahoney was chipping away. “He’s our kind of people,” he assured all his friends from the Catholic association. Bissell was also making the rounds of the delegates. Many of them seemed receptive to Cleveland but wanted to meet the candidate in person. Bissell and the other floor managers “inundated” Cleveland with telegrams pleading with him to come to Syracuse. Cleveland was never much for pressing the flesh. Even so, he heeded their advice and took the next available train, stewing the entire time. “It was almost beyond my understanding what to do, or for what purpose I was needed at Syracuse,” he complained.
At dusk, he reached Syracuse, where he was greeted with “bombshell” news.
Word had come down that the Republican convention in Saratoga had denied the incumbent governor, Alonzo Cornell, the nomination for reelection. It was a huge shock to everyone. In his place, U.S. treasury secretary Charles J. Folger had been given the nod. The robber baron Jay Gould was seen as the invisible hammer behind the power play, acting with the connivance of President Chester A. Arthur and former New York senator Roscoe Conkling. Cornell and Conkling hated each other. It all reeked of machine politics at the highest national level.
In Syracuse, Democrats realized that the ham-fisted Republicans had committed an act of self-immolation. A Democratic politician with a clean record of independence could actually win the statehood. It was as if the stars had aligned for Cleveland.
In the lobby of his hotel, on an unusually hot night for Upstate New York in late September, the habitually proper Cleveland was dripping with sweat. He took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves as Bissell and Mahoney rounded up one delegate after another and introduced them to the bachelor mayor from Buffalo who was causing such a stir. It gave them, Cleveland said, a “chance to look me over. I came rather to enjoy it.”
Reporters from the New York City newspapers also got to check out this intriguing new figure in politics. Watching him in action in the hotel lobby, the correspondent from The New York Times sent a dispatch describing Grover Cleveland to the citizens of the largest city in America:
His features are regular and full of intelligent expression. His eyes are dark and penetrating in their glances. He wears no beard, but a heavy dark mustache completely covers his mouth, and underneath is a square, firm chin. In his movements Mr. Cleveland is deliberate, dignified and graceful.
Finally, after Cleveland had finished his politicking in the hotel lobby, he went to pay his respects to the state chairman, Daniel Manning. It was the first time they had met.
In his hotel room, Manning shrewdly checked his temper. Maybe Edgar Apgar was right and Cleveland did represent the future of the party. Considering everything that was at stake, Cleveland left Manning on gracious terms. Definitely they could do business together down the road.
As far as Cleveland was concerned, his work was done. At 2:00 a.m., still shaking his head at the “novel experience” of his Syracuse adventure, he boarded a train back to Buffalo and was back at his desk at City Hall the same morning, where he awaited the outcome of the vote.
The convention at the Grand Opera House was called to order at 10:20 a.m. Poor lighting, combined with great clouds of cigar smoke, made it almost impossible to see from one end to the other. Dan Lockwood placed Cleveland’s name in nomination. He delivered a frosty speech that apparently did his candidate no good. Fortunately for Cleveland, the slender figure of Edgar Apgar made its way to the rostrum to second the nomination. Apgar spoke from the heart. He pointed to Cleveland’s machine-busting record as mayor. Here, at last, was a politician who was free of all political entanglements. Cleveland was beholden to no one. And he was the only candidate among the Democrats who Republicans would feel comfortable voting for. When Apgar was finished, the audience cheered.
“He had achieved that rare result in a political convention—he had changed votes.”
The delegates were called to order, and the balloting began. Tim Mahoney had cunningly packed the balcony with his Irish American chums, and when the first vote was recorded on the Grover Cleveland column, on cue, every Mahoney man bellowed their approval. The convention floor shook with the applause of the Clevelandites. At least from the peanut gallery, Cleveland was top choice.
The for
ces of Daniel Manning held solid. Every single one delivered for Slocum.
When the votes on the first ballot were tabulated, it went as predicted: Slocum had 98 and Flower 97. Cleveland’s support stood at 66. Another hundred votes were scattered among lesser candidates and favorite sons.
On the second ballot, Slocum and Flower gained, each polling 123. Cleveland garnered only 5 additional votes. The convention stood at a deadlock. But all the zeal seemed to be for Cleveland. Each new vote added to the Cleveland column produced scenes of pandemonium in the gallery. The people—at least Mahoney’s people—were screaming for a new kind of politics.
Still confident of victory, Congressman Flower buttonholed a Cleveland delegate from Buffalo and demanded to know which way Erie County would go once it was realized the Cleveland candidacy was doomed.
“Grover Cleveland,” came the response.
Flower blinked. Perhaps the chap did not understand the question. “But after you’re satisfied he can’t win, after you get through voting for him, who next?”
“Grover Cleveland.”
On the third ballot, the pendulum started to swing Cleveland’s way. The first break came when Columbia County was called and the nephew of the revered former governor of New York, Samuel J. Tilden, switched his vote from Slocum to Cleveland. To the audible groans from Slocum delegates, two other men from Columbia joined young Mr. Tilden.
Down the alphabetical lineup of counties went the roll call. Then came the turn of New York County, the largest in the state. Manhattan was split between the forces of reform and those aligned with Tammany Hall, alienated from each other, and barely on speaking terms. All thirty-eight reformist delegates switched to Cleveland. That did it. Boss Kelly of Tammany Hall gave his men a stiff nod of assent, and 23 votes were suddenly swung for Cleveland. Kelly became the convention’s kingmaker, even if he loathed the politics of the king he had just crowned.
A Secret Life: The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland Page 13