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

by Charles Lachman

  Over brandy and cigars on the eve of Cleveland’s inauguration, Cornell generously offered him whatever assistance he could provide.

  Cleveland spent an uneasy first night in the mansion, which was just too enormous to suit his simple bachelor taste. It had been erected in 1856 as a two-story Italianate at 138 Eagle Street, on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River. The furniture was heavy and traditional, the library paneled in rich black walnut. An excellent greenhouse offered a daily supply of fresh-cut flowers, and there was an arched porte cochere that was of little use to Cleveland as he owned neither horses nor a carriage; he intended to walk to work. For a man who had spent his adult life residing in boardinghouses and hotels, it was all too much, and he let it be known that he wanted to move out and establish himself at a hotel so he could “live the same bachelor life as in Buffalo.”

  Cleveland’s advisors howled in protest. William Dorsheimer, a former lieutenant governor, told him flat-out that abandoning the governor’s mansion would send the wrong signal and “offend” the people of New York, who had provided their chief executive with an official residence that was a perk of the office. Unpersuaded, Cleveland insisted on moving to a hotel. Only after Dorsheimer, for whom this was confirmation of Cleveland’s “utter disregard of the trappings and glory of the office,” pointed out that Cleveland would be “overwhelmed” by citizens and lobbyists who would take advantage of the easy access his hotel living offered did the governor-elect finally relent.

  On the morning of the inauguration, Cleveland was escorted into the Senate Chamber behind a squad of police who drove a wedge through the crowd. Everyone made way for him. At his side was Alonzo Cornell.

  Cornell, speaking first, put past issues aside and had only the kindest words for his successor. Like Cleveland, he was a big man with an oversized head and hulking physique. Side by side, the outgoing and incoming governors could have passed for siblings. Cornell wished Cleveland Godspeed and left the stage to him.

  Governor Cleveland’s inaugural address impressed everyone, not so much for its content but for his delivery. Cleveland had an extraordinary capacity for total recall of the written word, and had committed his entire speech to memory. Not once did he look at his prepared text. Speaking in a clear and deliberate voice, and enunciating every word with perfect diction, he praised Cornell as a “tried and trusted” public servant and acknowledged that the people of New York had taken a giant leap of faith in electing as governor someone “yet to be tried.” In his inaugural address, all those years of honing his communication skills before Erie County juries came together.

  The next day, Cleveland got down to the business of running a great state. As Buffalo’s mayor, he had been venerated for governing on the principle that every citizen had the right to visit him in his office at City Hall and have a chat. Word got out in quick order that Cleveland was bringing the same open-door policy to Albany; it disgusted his lieutenant governor, David Hill, who, along with William Hudson, watched helplessly as a “throng” of citizens wandered the halls of the Executive Chamber seeking out the new governor. The former Brooklyn Eagle reporter had left journalism to join the Cleveland administration as a political aide.

  Hill grumbled that it was a waste of energy. “The governor might just as well place his desk on the grass in front of the capitol.” At least, he said, it would have the “advantage of the fresh air.” He told Hudson, “It must be stopped.”

  Hudson had to agree. These were tourists or the idly curious who had no business being there.

  In due time, Cleveland came to realize that he could not operate effectively without setting limits on access to his office. This, after all, was the state capital, not frontier land in Buffalo.

  Daniel Lamont was proving himself to be indispensable, but he found Cleveland a tough boss to work for—obstinate, and almost impossible to dissuade once he had formulated an opinion. Lamont learned that the best way to deal with him was to avoid direct “combat,” and instead maneuver and sometimes deploy harmless trickery to accomplish his objectives. One day, Cleveland was interviewing a politician from Syracuse who was seeking the appointment of superintendent of a vast tract of state-owned property known as the State Salt Reservation. Cleveland took “enormous fancy” to this fellow, who was handsome and engaging and a great communicator. Lamont did some checking with his contacts in Syracuse and concluded that the man in question was an “undesirable citizen . . . not guided by rules of morality.” What that meant was anybody’s guess; nevertheless, Cleveland announced his intention to nominate him.

  Lamont was alarmed, worried that the appointment would be a “blunder of great dimensions” that could bring embarrassment to the new administration. He sought out Lieutenant Governor Hill, and together they scripted a gambit. Cleveland was at his desk in the Executive Chamber when Hill wandered in for a friendly chat. Lamont, having been appointed Cleveland’s private secretary and military secretary, with the honorary rank of colonel, was at his desk at the other end of the office. Secretive, shrewd, and of “infinite tact” in Cleveland’s opinion, Lamont had been heaven-sent. “I never saw his like. He has no friends to gratify or reward and no enemies to punish.”

  “Good afternoon, Governor,” Hill began and, with a wink and a nod, turned his attention to Lamont. “Good afternoon, Dan. I see your old friend from Syracuse was here today.”

  Playing out his part, Lamont said, “Yes, he was here.”

  “Was he sober?”

  Cleveland’s head shot up in surprise. Now they had his full attention.

  “Seemed to be,” Lamont said.

  “How did he get here?” When Lamont replied by train, Hill said that would have required money. “Who’d he borrow it from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he go away sober?”

  “I don’t know. Didn’t see him after he left here.”

  “How did he get back? Didn’t borrow money from you, did he?”

  “Oh, no,” answered Lamont. “I kept out of his way.”

  With a snort, Cleveland resumed his work, but he had taken everything in. It had all gone according to the script, and the disreputable gentleman from Syracuse never got the appointment.

  In Buffalo, Cleveland had been known as the Veto Mayor; now he was becoming known as the Veto Governor. The scale of Albany’s corruption proved as institutionally deep-rooted as Buffalo’s, and then some. A young reform-minded Republican assemblyman, Theodore Roosevelt, estimated that a third of his fellow legislators were agreeable to putting their votes up for sale—sometimes on the floor of the state assembly chamber itself.

  Cleveland set a new standard: Every bill that was up for passage had to meet the standard of good government; otherwise it was dead. The veto that aroused the biggest hullabaloo concerned the railroad fare. Tammany Boss John Kelly—the so-called friend of the workingman—led the fight to reduce the ten-cent fare on the 6th Avenue and 9th Avenue elevated railroads in Manhattan to a nickel. Naturally, it was a popular piece of legislation, and the senate passed it by the overwhelming vote of 24 to 5. Cleveland, knowing that a tempest would come his way, showed real political courage in vetoing the measure on solid business and constitutional grounds. He was getting ready for bed after he had sent his veto message to the senate when he thought to himself, By tomorrow at this time, I shall be the most unpopular man in the State of New York.

  Cleveland woke up at seven the next morning, had his breakfast, and walked to the office with the weight of the world on his shoulders. He dared not look at the stack of New York City newspapers that he knew for certain would have launched full-scale attacks on his young administration. As he went through the morning mail with Dan Lamont, still thinking about those newspapers, in as casual a tone as he could muster, he asked Lamont, “Seen the morning papers, Dan?”

  “Yes.”

  “What have they got to say about me, anything?”

  “Why, yes,” said Lamont, “they are all praising you.”

&
nbsp; Cleveland was stunned. “They are? Well, here, let me see them.” Cleveland scooped up the papers and read—in the Tribune, World, Mail, and Express—that they were solidly in his corner. Even the Sun, which had urged passage of the five-cent fare, was extolling Cleveland’s pluck. The governor exhaled a deep sigh of relief.

  Tammany Hall, whose support for Cleveland at the Democratic state convention in Syracuse had put him over the top, now demanded a “few crumbs” of political patronage from him. Boss Kelly’s puppet in the state senate, Tom Grady, sent the governor a note asking that, as a special favor, Cleveland name a former Tammany Hall alderman, Bryan Reilly, harbormaster of New York City.

  “I hope that you will kindly make the appointment for me as it will place me in a most humiliating position with my people here if . . . I should fail.”

  Grady was notorious for patronizing Albany’s slimiest whorehouses and saloons; Cleveland could not abide the man. It gave him pleasure to reject the Reilly appointment, and the political consequences be damned. That Cleveland refused to throw Tammany Hall such a piddling spoil of war spoke volumes: Under the Cleveland administration, Tammany could not even count on obtaining a lowly night watchman’s position for one of its own.

  Observing all this downriver in Manhattan was Tammany’s boss, the cunning John Kelly, who was getting the message that Cleveland was no pushover. Kelly had become a wealthy man—although “no one quite knew how.” He was also Irish American royalty. When he had been elected to Congress in 1855, at the height of the Know Nothing movement, he was the only Catholic in the House of Representatives. After his wife died, he solidified his regal position in American Catholicism by taking for his bride the niece of John Cardinal McCloskey, who in 1875 had been chosen by Pope Pius IX to be the first American cardinal.

  In October 1883, Cleveland shot yet another arrow at Tammany. In a letter he drafted to Kelly, he began by saying that he wanted to be “entirely frank,” then went on to demand that the disreputable Tom Grady be kicked off the ballot in the coming fall elections, just three weeks away. He showed the letter to Lamont, who disapproved. Why pick a fight with Tammany now? The presidential campaign was around the corner, and Cleveland would need Tammany’s cooperation.

  “Well,” said Cleveland after considering what Lamont had to say, “I’m going to send it.” And he did.

  Kelly held on to the letter for more than two weeks, while it seemed to beburning a metaphorical hole in his pocket. For him the issue was the Catholic working class versus the Protestant Anglo-Saxon establishment as represented by Cleveland. The governor, of course, never saw it as sectarian warfare, just straightforward good government. Kelly never responded to Cleveland’s letter, but he did leak it to his friends at the New York World.

  Kelly had begun to hate Cleveland with a “sleepless vindictiveness.”

  As a hard frost swept over New York State that winter of 1883, Frances Folsom had boys on her mind. The dorm room she shared with Katherine Willard was decorated with photographs of Frances’s beaus, and apparently there were several. Two proposals of marriage came her way during a single memorable visiting day in her sophomore year at Wells. She rejected one and said yes to the other, but after a few weeks made it clear to her new fiancé that it was not meant to be. Charles Townsend now had company.

  “When I marry, it must be someone more than a year older than I am,” she wrote her mother, indicating that she was looking for maturity in a husband. The man she would marry, Frances said, had to be “someone I can look up to and respect.”

  Contact with young men and communication with the outside world was strictly supervised at Wells College. The dean, known as the lady principal, was Helen Fairchild Smith. Not much got by Miss Smith, who maintained the list of “approved correspondents” for Wells students. The daughter of the president of Wesleyan College in Connecticut, at Wells, she also taught English literature. It was said that she ruled her students with a just and steady hand, and though the girls sometimes chaffed under her stern restrictions, they idolized her.

  Ice-skating on the frozen surface of Cayuga Lake was a favorite winter sport at Wells, and sometimes an excursion with the good-looking cadets from the Cayuga Lake Military Academy would be arranged—but always under the eagle eye of Miss Smith or another chaperone she so designated.

  At Wells everyone dressed for dinner, and formal eveningwear was required at all concerts and evening lectures. It was not acceptable for a student to show any leg, so proper attire, meaning a long dress, was expected, even to play bridge.

  Frances was a leading lady on campus. With her authentic stage presence and lovely voice, she almost always landed a principal role in the college’s Shakespearian productions. She also had a naughty sense of humor. Once, when the campus was buzzing with excitement over the double wedding of two alumni, Frances found a white robe and a black shawl and parodied the ceremony; playing the part of the bishop, she read from the actual vows, and everybody howled.

  Frances was also a skilled debater for the Phoenix Society, the campus debating club, which tackled such serious subjects as free trade, the tariff and protectionism, and all the hot-button political topics of the day. On every issue, ever loyal to her guardian, Grover Cleveland, she took the official Democratic Party line. Politics was second nature to her.

  Deemed the most beautiful student on campus, in the art studio above Morgan Hall, Frances posed for a photograph as Urania, goddess of astronomy, which was turned into a poster to promote an evening of mythology and revelry. Without any other student who came close to matching her goddess-like physical beauty, it was perfect casting. And her whimsical fondness for her masculine pet name Frank seemed to add to her charm.

  The dorm room of Frances Folsom and Katherine Willard resounded with giggles and the innocent girlish commotion of young women always running in and out. Sometimes Frances entertained her friends with stories of her life back in Buffalo as the ward of the newly elected Governor Grover Cleveland. And her stories would be even more entertaining when he became a potential candidate for the presidency.

  Helen Smith never missed a thing. In a college packed with girls who came from wealth and upper-class privilege, at some point she recognized how exceptional Frances was, and undertook the mission of educating the teenager. Whether through insight or intuition, she saw the unique role Frances could play in American history. The word on the Wells College campus—heard “more than once”—was that Miss Smith was preparing Frances “specifically for the White House.”

  8

  STIRRINGS OF A SCANDAL

  IN THE EARLY months of 1884, politicians began to gear up for the presidential election. A wave of momentum was building for the former governor of New York, Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, who had been robbed of the presidency in what was called the Crime of ’76, the most disputed presidential election in American history.

  Tilden had won the popular vote over Rutherford B. Hayes by 250,000 votes, but after some double-dealing in the Electoral College, it was Hayes who ended up in the White House. When it seemed that the United States was tottering on the brink of another civil war, Tilden earned the esteem of history by graciously accepting defeat. Having sacrificed his presidential ambitions for the sake of national harmony, he retired a political martyr and was living as a recluse at his country estate, Greystone, outside Yonkers, New York. Such was the enduring bitterness over the 1876 election it was thought that Tilden could have the Democratic nomination with a snap of his fingers—if he truly desired it.

  A sympathetic journalist who went to interview the Sage of Greystone found him in failing health: Would Tilden throw his hat in the ring? he asked him. Tilden smiled meekly and said, “My boy, don’t you see it is impossible?”

  Whether Tilden would declare was a touchy subject within the party. Daniel Manning, state party chairman, owed his political career to Tilden and would not offend him under any circumstances. Grover Cleveland not only appreciated Manning’s position, he also concurred
with it, and was ambivalent about seeking the nomination anyway. Like most of the other potential Democratic nominees, he was willing to step aside should the great Tilden declare he was a candidate for the office he had been cheated out of eight years before.

  As the party convention loomed, one day when Manning thought Cleveland aide William Hudson was becoming too aggressive in promoting his boss’s standing on the national stage, he warned, “Cleveland is not yet a candidate, and Tilden is not out of the way.”

  But even Manning began to understand that the time had come for Tilden to formally announce or make way for fresh blood. Such a mission was fraught with delicacy and required diplomacy. And it had to be done in person.

  Tilden lived with a coterie of servants in a hundred-room stone villa. On warm spring days, he could be found on the veranda gazing out at his commanding view of the Hudson. The former governor suffered from colic and a stomach bloated with gas; unable to tolerate solid foods, he lived on broth. On a bad day, a bit of toast could bring on a spasm of vomiting and diarrhea. He had a weak heart and walked with a cane. One arm was useless, and he could barely make it to the top of the staircase without the assistance of his valet, Louis.

  “What makes me puff so?” he would ask Louis.

  Tilden was seventy years old when Manning went to see him. The party chairman found the rumors of Tilden’s failing health to be all too true. He was shocked at Tilden’s physical deterioration. Tilden’s good hand shook with palsy, and his facial muscles trembled, and his lower jaw drooped—the consequence of a paralytic stroke. His voice was a barely audible whisper. It was obvious that he did not have long to live. Yet his eyes—at least the one eye he could still see out of—still sparkled with intellect.

  Manning laid everything out. He explained that he had met with Grover Cleveland the week before, and that Cleveland wanted to assure Tilden of his anti-Tammany credentials and commitment to the great principles of reform and good government. Manning also wanted Tilden to know that should Cleveland be elected president, he, Tilden, would have a hand in naming his cabinet.