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

by Charles Lachman

  Tilden hesitated—in part the natural objection an old man would have to being pushed, however gently, out the door and into oblivion. He said he did not want to be seen as favoring Cleveland or any other candidate, plus, he had “profound” questions about Cleveland’s credentials. Was this man really prepared to govern 60 million Americans? Tilden said he wanted to think about it for a day or two. Actually, it only took a day.

  “I ought not to assume a task which I have not the physical strength to carry through,” he wrote Manning in a letter that was promptly made public. Tilden said his life in public service was now “forever closed.”

  In Albany, Cleveland reached an understanding with Manning. He would stand as a candidate for national office, but only if President Chester Arthur or former secretary of state James G. Blaine of Maine secured the Republican nomination. Manning did not appreciate Cleveland’s hesitancy. “It’s difficult to understand the governor’s attitude,” he confided to William Hudson. Privately, he was peeved and wondered whether Cleveland had the fire in the gut that it took to play politics at the national level.

  Cleveland tried to explain his position to one of his closest allies in Albany, New York—state comptroller Alfred Chapin. In the strictest confidence, Cleveland informed Chapin about the “woman scrape” he had gotten himself into back in Buffalo almost a decade before. He could only pray that it would not come out.

  In early June 1884, Dan Lamont, William Hudson, and other key Cleveland advisors were gathered around a telephone in the Executive Mansion in Albany. All the ardent and ambitious men who were there that day were under forty, and they had hitched their wagons to the governor’s rising star. They were waiting for news from the Republican Party convention taking place in Chicago. It stood deadlocked between President Arthur and Blaine. Senator George Edmunds of Vermont was also in contention. At Exposition Hall the fourth ballot was under way.

  Seated at the other end of the long table, busying himself with paperwork, was Grover Cleveland, utterly indifferent to the outcome of the political drama unfolding in the Windy City. Two months earlier, he had unburdened his heart to his sister Mary, telling her how he felt about running for president.

  “I wish I might not hear my name mentioned in connection with it again,” he wrote her.

  Cleveland, holding up a printed copy of a bill he was considering vetoing, called out for Hudson, who couldn’t believe it. History was being made, and Cleveland wanted to debate some minor piece of legislation no one cared about. Hudson couldn’t take his eyes off that phone.

  “It does not appear to me that you are giving me your attention,” Cleveland complained.

  “Good heavens, Governor, how can you potter over these bills when any moment the announcement may be made of an event that will force you into the Democratic nomination for president?”

  Cleveland gave Hudson a knowing smile. “Oh, neither Blaine nor Arthur will be nominated,” he said. He sounded certain. “The Republican situation demands the nomination of Edmunds. Edmunds will be nominated.” Blaine had a reputation for shady political wheeling and dealing. And Arthur was president by accident, having assumed the office following the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881. On the other hand, Edmund Edwards had an unblemished reputation as the squeaky-clean intellectual of the Senate.

  At that moment, the telephone came to life. It was over.

  “Blaine’s nominated!”

  Everyone howled for joy, surrounding Cleveland, when Hudson saw something that unnerved him: Grover Cleveland’s face took on a “hard” expression; then a wave of gloom seemed to engulf him. The suggestion of a tear appeared at the corner of his eye.

  “Now we’ll have you for the Democratic nominee,” someone shouted. The Democratic National Convention was just four weeks away.

  Cleveland grabbed a pile of paperwork on his desk. “Go away, boys, and let me do my work as governor. You’re always trying to get me into a scrape.”

  One month later, everyone would know just what Cleveland meant.

  Dr. George W. Lewis could still remember the day when Maria Halpin came to see him. It had been eight years before, in 1876. Dr. Lewis was seeing patients in his medical office in Buffalo when Maria Baker, a regular patient of his, walked in with Maria Halpin. She told Dr. Lewis that her friend Mrs. Halpin needed his wise counsel.

  Maria Halpin told Dr. Lewis her story: Grover Cleveland had raped her, and the son that had been conceived had been forcibly taken from her and placed in an orphanage. Cleveland had had her thrown into an insane asylum and wanted to run her out of town.

  Lewis had gently explained that as a physician, there were limits to what he could do about her situation, and sent Mrs. Halpin and Mrs. Baker on their way. That was his first and last encounter with Maria Halpin.

  Over the years, Dr. Lewis had said nothing about the episode. He had stood by when Grover Cleveland became mayor of Buffalo, and had kept his silence after Cleveland was elected governor of the state. Now Cleveland stood on the verge of winning the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.

  Dr. Lewis came from a colorful family; it was not in his nature to live timidly. His brother, Dr. Diocletian Lewis, was a well-known homeopathic physician who was prominent in the national temperance movement. Another brother, Loren Lewis, was a judge in Buffalo. All three Lewis brothers were fitness fanatics who worked out with dumbbells in an era when staying in top physical condition was unusual and considered a little eccentric. Judge Lewis’s wife, Charlotte, had founded the Ingle-side Home for unwed mothers, so the Lewis family was disposed to assist women in trouble.

  In July 1884, Dr. Lewis decided the time had come to let somebody know about Maria Halpin and Grover Cleveland. He set his sights on a leading Buffalo churchman, Reverend George H. Ball, pastor of the Free Baptist Church on Hudson Street. Dr. Lewis told Ball everything he knew about Mrs. Halpin. The Baptist minister found the story truly unsettling. Could it be that the nation stood on the verge of electing a depraved libertine to the White House?

  Ball was sixty-five years old and had a distinguished pedigree: He was a descendant of George Washington’s mother, Mary Ball. George Ball had grown up in Ohio, and as a young principal, he had taught a future president, James Garfield. He had gone to Buffalo in 1850 to preach on the docks. He found a vacant building and built a church. Over the years, while he and his wife raised five children, he earned a national reputation as a theologian and author of The Story of Jesus. He was also in a roundabout way responsible for one of the great industrial fortunes in American history. In 1880, Ball had loaned his enterprising nephews Frank and Edmund $200 to go into business selling tin containers for storing paint, varnishes, and kerosene. The company came to be called Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Company and became a huge success when it added glass jars for canning fruits to its production line. Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, is named after the family.

  George Ball knew Grover Cleveland. In 1882 he had gone to see then-Mayor Cleveland to request a donation to build a new church. Cleveland wrote a check for $50. Politically, however, Ball and Cleveland were polar opposites. Ball had served as a delegate to the first Republican National Convention in 1856 and had been active in the antislavery movement. That Cleveland had dodged the Civil War draft and was now threatening to end a quarter century of unbroken Republican rule in the White House since Abraham Lincoln’s momentous victory in 1860 made Ball ideologically prepared to think the worst of Cleveland.

  After Ball had listened to everything Lewis had to say about Cleveland and Maria Halpin, and taken notes, he was determined to investigate the story. And he had plenty of leads to pursue.

  Ball went to see William Flint and Henry Kent, the owners of the Flint & Kent department store where Maria Halpin had once worked. The last thing in the world the merchants needed was to get caught up in a sex scandal, but they did confirm for Ball the essence of Maria’s claim that she had been let go after becoming pregnant with Cleveland’s chil
d.

  Next, Ball sought out Maria Baker and the attorney Milo Whitney. He also spoke with Dr. William Ring, medical director of the Providence Lunatic Asylum where Maria had been placed following her seizure by two off-duty Buffalo police officers. So far, everything was checking out.

  After that, Ball went to Vine Alley in Buffalo in search of a Mrs. McLean. She had been Grover Cleveland’s janitress at the Weed Block apartment building, where he’d lived before moving to Albany. Vine Alley—or the Alley as it was called in local parlance—had a notorious reputation, second only to Canal Street’s, as a tenderloin district of infamy. It was claimed that more bottles of wine were opened nightly on Vine Alley than on any other street in America, with the exception of Broadway in Manhattan. Thunderbolt Smith, a boxer of national repute, ran a popular saloon on the Alley.

  Vice was more or less condoned by police, so for his personal safety, George Ball asked another minister, E. S. Hubbell, to accompany him. These two elderly gentlemen of the cloth poking around disreputable Vine Alley must have made an amusing spectacle, but they managed to find Mrs. McLean’s apartment. They asked the cleaning lady what she knew about Cleveland, but she had nothing incriminating to offer.

  Ball followed every lead he got but could not locate Maria Halpin. No one seemed to know where she was living, only that she had left Buffalo in shame and had not been heard from in eight years. Not even Mrs. Baker knew how to find her. It was a huge gap in his investigation, but at this point, Ball believed he had enough on Cleveland to convene a summit of the city’s leading Christian ministers. It was an extraordinary gathering. Thirty clergymen from every denomination, including the Catholic diocese, listened in shocked incredulity as Ball laid out the evidence he had collected. Rumors about out-of-control drinking had chased Cleveland since his time as Erie County sheriff. His bachelorhood also made him suspect. But they couldn’t have expected this. Ball argued that they could not stand by while this depraved character Cleveland ran for the highest office in the land.

  As the committee dithered, Ball did what he could to get the word out. For seven years during the 1870s, he had served as editor of the Baptist Union newspaper in New York City, so he knew how to make his voice heard. Targeting religious publications where his name carried the utmost credibility, he sent letters to the editors of the Chicago Advance, the Independent, and the Christian Union. His letters were crammed with names and information—a blueprint for anyone interested in pursuing the allegations against Cleveland. They were not meant for publication, but to offer off-the-record guidance to the opinion makers who held sway over the votes of millions of churchgoing Americans.

  A letter from Ball landed on the desk of the editor of the Chicago Advance, where the Democratic National Convention was being held:

  Dear Advance—It may be too late to do you any good, and may not be needed, but I feel moved to warn you against saying much to the credit of Grover Cleveland. He is a libertine. No Christian should condone his crimes so far as to commend his candidacy. About seven years ago he seduced the head of the cloak department of Flint & Kent’s, leading merchants here. He kidnapped the woman after the boy was born, sent her to the Catholic Insane Asylum [sic] and took the child from her. She escaped, got Milo A. Whitney to help her, finally settled and gave up the child for $500. This I know to be true, for I have it confirmed by Flint & Kent, by Mr. Whitney, her attorney, and by Mrs. Wm. Baker, where the woman boarded.

  Ball’s letter accused Cleveland of having a reputation in Buffalo of the “grossest licentiousness.” He informed the editor of the Advance—a publication of the Congregational church that was said to reach the “very best class of people”—that letters had been sent to the Independent and the Christian Union because both publications had published sycophantic articles about Cleveland that Ball had found “alarming.” Ball wrote that he had detected nothing objectionable in the Advance’s coverage of the presidential election, but “it will do no harm for you to know the facts” before writing another word that could be seen as advancing a Cleveland candidacy.

  The rumor mill started churning.

  Daniel Manning asked William Hudson to urgently come see him. Hudson found Manning in his office at the bank he owned in Albany, the National Commercial Bank.

  “There is more work for you to do, and it is most important work,” Manning told Hudson. He held three lists in his fist.

  “I’m enlisted for the war, Mr. Manning, and am subject to your orders.”

  “You may not like this, but it must be done by someone.” Manning explained that the first list was of the names of the New York delegates going to the national convention who were committed to Cleveland; on another list were names of those delegates opposed to Cleveland. It was the third list—uncommitted or “doubtful” delegates—that Manning wanted to talk about. There were six or eight names on it. Without their support, Manning said, Cleveland could not win a two-thirds majority—the treasured “super-majority”—and without a crushing victory in New York, Cleveland could be denied the nomination.

  “Now, I want you to devote yourself to these doubtful men,” Manning told Hudson. “We must subject them to pressure, but first we must learn the sort of pressure which should be applied. That’s your work.”

  Hudson, realizing the importance of the assignment, was overcome with apprehension. “It is something like detective work,” he observed.

  “Much like it,” Manning replied, “but detective work that can be done only by a man acquainted with state and local politics.”

  Hudson started making inquiries, reaching out to his circle of contacts and using all the research skills he had accumulated as a political journalist at The Brooklyn Eagle. He looked into the background of the delegates in question, probing for vulnerabilities and susceptibilities, which Manning told him in blunt language could be political, commercial, or moral. Hudson was two weeks into the task when Manning summoned him to the bank again. A crisis was in the making.

  “You must go to Chicago at once,” Manning told Hudson, adding that somebody else would have to complete his work. Right now he was urgently needed on the ground in Chicago to open the Cleveland-for-President headquarters. “Stand for the cause till we get there.”

  When Hudson arrived in Chicago, he found the city in the grip of anti-Cleveland fervor. Emissaries from Tammany Hall were stirring up the populace and spreading poison about Cleveland such as that he was an anti-Irish bigot. There was also some crazy rumor that Cleveland had hidden away “illegitimate progeny.” It didn’t take any brilliant investigative work on Hudson’s part to determine the source of the smear campaign: It was Cleveland’s old adversary from Albany, State Senator Thomas F. Grady, recently ousted from his senate seat in a Cleveland-inspired coup. Now a full-time Tammany Hall operative, Grady was in Chicago making the rounds of the newspapers and saloons and hotels and telling anyone he could grab by the lapels that Cleveland was “bitterly hostile to anything related to Catholicity” and a dissolute drunkard besides. Intelligent people who should have known better actually believed this propaganda, and Hudson found to his bewilderment that the whispering campaign was gaining traction.

  Hudson set up shop downtown at the Palmer House, in three of the hotel’s largest parlors, and hung a portrait of Grover Cleveland over the entryway. He did what he could to “neutralize” Grady’s mischief and privately reassured the newspaper boys and local politicos that Cleveland harbored no animosity toward the Irish.

  Delegates and their cronies by the thousands started pouring into Chicago. Boss John Kelly of Tammany Hall controlled half the Manhattan delegates going to the convention. The rest of the delegation stood solid for Cleveland. But the flashy Kelly was the rogue star everybody wanted to hear from. Fearless, always the showman, Kelly and 700 Tammany “braves” pulled into Chicago on July 6 on board two chartered trains—each twenty-five cars in length, one train having tailed the other all the way from New York. Everyone climbed out wearing pearl-colored stovepipe hats
and marched in formation to the Palmer House where they were staying, with Kelly and a brass band in the lead.

  After he had cleaned up from his long trip, the sixty-two-year-old Kelly met with reporters and delivered his opening salvo against Cleveland.

  “I would regard Cleveland’s nomination very much in the light of party suicide,” he said. “It would kill us.”

  “Will you support Governor Cleveland if he is nominated?”

  Stroking his neatly trimmed beard, Kelly said, “I will not lift a hand for him.”

  “Will you oppose him?”

  “You can print this as coming from me,” Kelly said, and in case anyone missed it the first time, he repeated his declaration of utter hostility to the governor of his own state: “I will not lift a hand to aid in the election of Grover Cleveland if he is nominated.” Revenge tasted sweet to Boss Kelly. Cleveland had built his good government credentials by turning his back on Tammany Hall, and for that the candidate was now paying the price.

  The hub of the action was the Palmer House. Every room was taken, and the lobby and hallways were jammed with men perspiring in Chicago’s summer heat. At the bars it was standing room only, and it was said that some of the New Yorkers were a “trifle careless in their use of stimulants.”

  Intrigue followed Kelly wherever he went. Every now and then, a rebel yell could be heard coming from his room. Kelly enjoyed being the center of attention. He stayed up well past midnight his first night in Chicago, consulting with General Benjamin Butler. He was the former governor of Massachusetts who had come to Chicago, having already won—but not yet formally accepted—the presidential nomination of two minor populist parties, the Anti-Monopoly Party and the Greenback Party. Now he was seeking the Democratic nod. Butler had an inflated sense of self-importance, but he had done some notable things in his life—as governor, he had appointed the first Irish American judge and the first black judge. But Southern delegates remembered Butler for other reasons—during the Civil War, he had been known by the epithet “Spoons,” due to accusations that he had pilfered the silverware of Southern plantations in which he resided during military campaigns. He was also called “the Beast,” because of his stern rule as commander of Union forces occupying New Orleans, during which he issued the notorious General Order No. 28, decreeing that a woman showing disrespect to a Union soldier would be deemed a “woman of the town plying her avocation”—that is, a prostitute.