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

by Charles Lachman

  With Maria Halpin still missing in action, Cleveland’s allies geared up their efforts to turn the tide of public opinion. One of these self-appointed sleuths was Kinsley Twining. A mugwump and Congregational minister from Cambridge, Massachusetts, he came from a distinguished New England family whose ancestral history could be traced back to William the Conqueror. The Twinings had arrived in America around 1641 and settled on Cape Cod. Kinsley’s grandfather graduated from Yale in 1795, as did his father in 1820, and Kinsley in 1853. As the literary editor of the Independent, a daily religious newspaper founded by Henry Ward Beecher, Twining’s ties to Beecher along with his mugwump politics disposed him to do anything he could to spin the scandal in Cleveland’s favor.

  Twining had just turned fifty-two when he showed up in Buffalo to speak with journalists, lawyers, clergymen, and other gentlemen of influence—“the noblest Christian men in the city.” Though he spent only two days there, he called it a “most thorough” investigation. Twining’s bias was obvious in the first sentence of his report, which states that he refuses to republish the “grosser” particulars of the accusations facing Cleveland. “Those who want it can get it from the publisher of the Buffalo Telegraph, who will be glad to sell copies.”

  There was a “kernel of truth” in the Cleveland scandal, Twining acknowledged, namely this: “When he was younger than he is now, he was guilty of an illicit connection.” For his part, Twining said, “I can forgive it.”

  “But the charge, as brought against him, lacks the elements of truth in these substantial points: There was no seduction, no adultery, no breach of promise, no obligation of marriage. After the primary offense . . . his conduct was singularly honorable, showing no attempt to evade responsibility, and doing all he could to meet the duties involved, of which marriage was not one. There was no abduction, only proper legal action under circumstances which demanded it.”

  Twining made no effort to communicate with Maria Halpin, Dr. Ring, Milo Whitney, Mrs. Baker, or any other key witness in the affair. As for the broad assertions that Cleveland was a drunk and a libertine, Twining said, “They are, I believe, the product of the imagination of the stews. Every attempt to trace them led back into the merest gossip of saloons and brothels.”

  Twining concluded his report by waxing poetic about Cleveland. “He is a man of true and kind heart, a born ruler of men. He has the heartiest respect of the best families in the city.”

  Also snooping around Buffalo was another ostensibly impartial investigator whose objectivity was open to question. G. C. Hodges was a Boston lawyer who had been dispatched there by a board of mugwumps from Massachusetts who were calling themselves the Committee of One Hundred. They made no secret of their political convictions: A sixty-page pamphlet pointing out the “dark side” of James G. Blaine’s character was in the process of being printed and distributed, at the committee’s expense, to “everybody and his eldest son” in the state of Massachusetts.

  Hodges spent several days in Buffalo. His investigation took him to the offices of Charles A. Gould, collector of the port of Buffalo, who didn’t have much to offer but steered him to a local businessman, Henry C. French. Supposedly, French knew all about Grover Cleveland’s drinking and bawdy behavior, but when Hodges asked him whether he had ever seen Cleveland drunk, French was incensed, using language so “vigorous” that Hodges fled for his physical safety.

  Proceeding with his investigation, Hodges tracked down a wealthy Buffalo manufacturer who was said to have firsthand knowledge of Cleveland’s debauchery. The manufacturer said he had heard the allegations from his plant foreman. Hodges interviewed the foreman who said he got it from a saloonkeeper. It was like a 19th-century game of telephone.

  When Hodges departed Buffalo, he was said to be “indignant and disgusted with the people who were making such reckless and unsupported charges.” Upon his return to Boston, he reported back to the Committee of One Hundred that he had given George Ball “every opportunity” to lay out the evidence and offer up supporting witnesses, but Ball had refused to cooperate.

  Finally, there was the report issued by the National Committee of Independent Republicans. Its name conveyed clout and broad national influence, but it was an illusion; in truth, the committee consisted of sixteen Buffalo mugwumps. The historian J. N. Larned and the lawyers Henry Sprague and Ansley Wilcox, members of the committee, had known Grover Cleveland socially over the years or from his brief tenure as mayor. There was no question of where they were in the political spectrum.

  The findings were released to the nation in mid-August with the assurances that the investigation had been “carefully and deliberately made.”

  “The general charges of drunkenness and gross immorality which are made against Governor Cleveland are absolutely false,” the committee concluded. How had it reached such a judgment? “From personal knowledge,” the committee declared, “as his acquaintances of long-standing.”

  As for Maria Halpin, the committee did not seem to know much about the woman at the center of the scandal. Although they professed to have made a careful and thorough investigation, they could not even pin down Maria’s precise age. She could only be described as a widow “between thirty and forty” when she had made Cleveland’s acquaintance. And, like Twining and Hodges, the committee had apparently made no effort to reach out to her.

  “The facts of the case show that she was not seduced, and that the allegations respecting her abduction and ill-treatment are wholly false.” In this rendering of the scandal, the Evening Telegraph was a newspaper of “no standing whatsoever,” and George Ball was guilty of spreading stories based on flimsy hearsay.

  On August 11, the day the committee report was released, a wave of relief swept over the Cleveland campaign. Unshackled at last to defend its man Cleveland, the Courier was exceptionally venomous in its attacks on Maria Halpin.

  “There was no abduction,” it declared. The Evening Telegraph article was replete with “cheap pathos.” The authorities had acted in the best interests of the child. “There was no cruelty. The mother was in a state of intoxication, and she was removed lawfully and with no more force than was necessary.”

  Probably for the first time since the “great bombshell” of the campaign had exploded, Cleveland had the upper hand. “Charges Wholly False,” the Boston Globe headline crowed. The Buffalo Courier: “Rev. Mr. Ball Shown Up.” The New York Times: “A Political Scandal Speedily Settled.” Mark Twain added his voice to the minions defending Cleveland. “To see grown men, apparently in their right mind, seriously arguing against a bachelor’s fitness for President because he had private intercourse with a consenting widow! Isn’t human nature the most consummate sham & lie that was ever invented?” Of course, Twain was missing the point: Sex had not been consensual, and Twain had shut his eyes to the forcible removal of Maria from her home to an insane asylum, and of her child from his mother.

  Behind closed doors, James G. Blaine’s Republican campaign managers were taking robust steps to stoke the fires of scandal and innuendo around Cleveland. One endeavor was to mail reprints of “A Terrible Tale” to households across America. In Massachusetts, bundles of the Boston Journal investigation were sent to the state’s farthest outposts. Sometimes the effort backfired. When the chairman of the Republican Committee in Franklin County, Massachusetts, received his bundle, he tendered his resignation.

  “Have just received your package of Boston Journals containing the detail of the ‘Cleveland Scandal,’ which I suppose you expect me, as a Republican town committee, to distribute,” he wrote back to party headquarters in Boston. “I do not propose . . . to assist in political warfare so mean and contemptible.”

  Letters were also sent to clergymen across the nation, pointing out the “abundant rumors” that Cleveland’s immoral behavior had continued well into his tenure as governor of New York. The letters were anonymous but were believed to be the handiwork of R. W. McMurdy, a minister who ran a clandestine Republican Party agency know
n as the Religious Bureau. They were usually postmarked Philadelphia, the ideal location for such an undercover operation; remote for purposes of denial, but close enough to Republican Party headquarters in New York to be supervised by Blaine’s people.

  The letters were clever works of propaganda. Real names were cited to enhance the credibility of the allegations. One letter in circulation attributed to William Arkell, publisher of the Albany Evening Journal, the statement to a friend that Cleveland frequented whorehouses in the state capital. Arkell was so offended, he went public, branding the letter a lie and challenging anyone who “has the cheek to make any such claims” to come forward.

  Another letter told the story of a gentleman from Buffalo who had been invited to spend the night at the governor’s mansion.

  “On coming down to breakfast one morning [he] discovered a female duly installed as mistress of the Executive Mansion, who had been transferred to her position from a bawdy house,” the letter went. The origin of the story was traced to John Palmer, a trustee of the old soldier’s and sailor’s home in Bath, New York. Moving aggressively to bury the tale, Cleveland’s private secretary, Dan Lamont, commanded Palmer to come to Albany for a face-to-face confrontation. Palmer apologized and disclosed his source, James Johnson, a former newspaper reporter with close ties to the Republican state committee. When Lamont contacted Johnson, he denied responsibility. On it went.

  Cleveland’s friends were concerned, but in his Broad Street offices at Spencer Trask & Co., New York banker George F. Peabody (cousin of the philanthropist George Foster Peabody) was confident of victory come November. “Everything looks well for Cleveland,” he reported. But he also wanted Cleveland to know that “certain parties who are troubled at the Halpin scandal but got over it are suspicious that there is some basis in truth for these whispers and they state openly that if they are true, they will not vote for him—this time they will not come back. These whispers I do not like.” Peabody was a friend of Reverend Samuel Smith Mitchell of the First Presbyterian Church in Buffalo. “He writes me that the worst about Cleveland has not been published.”

  Observing all this drama were Henry Ward Beecher and his wife, Eunice Bullard Beecher. He who is without sin let him cast the first stone, went the Scripture, and Beecher, the most famous man in America—nine years after standing trial for adultery—was inclined to go with Cleveland. Mrs. Beecher was less certain. Like Maria Halpin, Eunice Beecher had suffered the ignominy of public humiliation. Maria’s story resonated with her.

  Eunice Beecher’s brother had been Henry’s roommate at Amherst College. She was eighteen when she became engaged to Henry, and made an attractive bride, with her thick auburn hair and full-bodied figure. Eunice was raised in a strict New England household. Once when she came to dinner in what her father, a physician, observed to be a low-cut dress, he threw a bowl of hot soup at her, saying that since she must be cold, the soup would warm her up. There were seven brothers in her family who teased her unmercifully and left her an “oversensitive and insecure” woman.

  Certain women found the muscular Beecher incredibly attractive, and throughout their marriage, Eunice had heard rumors about her husband’s philandering. It was said that he had fathered their next-door neighbor’s daughter. Imagine Eunice’s misery as Henry doted on the little girl, who grew up looking more like him each passing year. So Eunice had experienced firsthand the anguish a husband’s dalliances could bring to a family.

  Women did not age well in the 19th century. When Henry Ward Beecher was brought to trial for adultery in 1875, his wife, seventy-two, was white-haired, stooped, and worn-out, having given birth to ten children, three of whom survived to adulthood. She was at court every day, sitting loyally behind the defense table, even on days when her husband showed his contempt for the proceedings by not bothering to be there. For six months she sat stern-faced and stoic in her simple black dress, listening to witnesses give provocative evidence about her “abysmal” marriage and philandering husband. At times the testimony was so lurid that the judge threatened to bar women from the courtroom. The case ended in a hung jury, and Beecher—somehow—resumed his life in the public arena as an esteemed minister of the faith.

  Now another eminent public figure—Grover Cleveland—was facing allegations of having fathered an illegitimate child. Eunice was following all twists and turns. She clipped all the articles. She became obsessed with the story.

  Without her husband’s knowledge, Eunice wrote a heartfelt letter to Cleveland, stuffing into the envelope several of the stories she had clipped. One article actually listed what was said to be the address of Cleveland’s favorite brothel in Albany, on 2nd Street. Another stated that Cleveland had been “grossly intoxicated” at his desk. Even his recent vacation to the Adirondacks was suspect. A Boston physician was quoted as saying it was his understanding that the true purpose of the trip was to cure Cleveland of a “malignant disease.” That was why he had taken Dr. Samuel Ward with him. (Ward became indignant when he was asked if he had accompanied Cleveland because he was ill. “What! The governor took no personal physicians into the woods with him. I took the governor. I ordered him to take a rest. Treatment! The only treatment he got was plenty of exercise that kept him almost steadily on the move from sunrise to sunset. A fine story indeed. What else will the liars manufacture?”)

  When Mrs. Beecher’s letter reached Cleveland in Albany, it made him weak in the knees. She wanted—demanded—to know whether the stories were true. Henry Ward Beecher’s wife could not be ignored. As swiftly as he could, Cleveland wrote back.

  “I am shocked and dumbfounded by the clippings from the newspapers that you sent me. . . . I have never seen in Albany a woman whom I have had any reason to suspect was in any way bad. I don’t know where any such woman lives in Albany. I have never been in any house in Albany except the Executive Mansion, the Executive Chamber, the First Orange Club House—twice on receptions given to me, and on, I think, two other occasions—and the residences of perhaps fifteen or twenty of the best citizens, to dine.

  “There never was a man who has worked harder or more hours in a day. Almost all my times [sic] has been spent in the Executive Chamber, and I hardly think there have been twenty nights in the year and nine months I have lived in Albany—unless I was out of town—that I have left my work earlier than midnight to find my bed at the mansion. I am at a loss to know how it is that such terrible, wicked, and utterly baseless lies can be invented. The contemptible creatures who coin and pass these things appear to think that the affair which I have not denied makes me defenseless against any and all slanderers.”

  Cleveland’s letter to Mrs. Beecher was, he said, “the most I have ever written on the subject” of Maria Halpin.

  In early September, four weeks after Maria Halpin had vanished, she showed up at her uncle’s house in New Rochelle—“crushed in spirit and broken in health.” Between fitful periods of sleep, she had quite a story to tell James Seacord. For the last month, she had been living in a house on the West Side of Manhattan. Everything had been arranged through the Democratic Party. Maria had been free to leave at any time, but she had been told that her life would be in mortal danger if she were to return to New Rochelle. She had bought into this half-truth until she had come to the realization that it was a ruse to keep her isolated from the world and out of the public arena until Election Day in November.

  Now back in New Rochelle and living under Seacord’s roof, Maria caught up on how the newspapers were reporting her story. It sickened her to read the extent to which her name had been smeared. Cleveland’s associates were branding her a vile harlot. General Horatio King’s interview with the New York World, in which he said in so many words that Oscar Folsom had fathered her illegitimate son, was especially tough to take.

  Even Maria’s son was coming under ferocious personal attack. In one report, Frederick was accused of using his mother’s misfortune to lobby Grover Cleveland for a state job. According to this trumped-up story—co
mplete with bogus quotes, courtesy once again of the zealous Boston Globe—Frederick, “at the suggestion of my mother,” had sat down with Cleveland in Albany and “asked him for a position.” Cleveland asked Frederick to send his references and he’d see what he could do.

  Whoever fabricated Frederick’s quotes may have thought he was being very cunning, but their effect was the opposite of what he’d intended. The Globe story induced Maria to give her first newspaper interview, to the Morning Journal newspaper in Manhattan. It was her first tentative step into the public arena to set the record straight.

  “Grover Cleveland is the father, and to say otherwise is infamous,” Maria declared. “The attempt to connect the dead Oscar Folsom with me or my boy, of which I hear, is cruel and cowardly. I had but a very slight acquaintance with Oscar Folsom. It does not seem possible after all I have suffered for Grover Cleveland and my boy’s sake that an attempt will be made to further blacken me in the eyes of the world.”

  Maria opened up about her ordeal, but just a little. She said that, in her prime, when she lived in Buffalo, men had found her attractive. “I was not as stout as I look now,” she ruefully admitted. “No one knows the extent of my sufferings. After my child was taken from me, I begged Cleveland on my knees to let me have a sight of my baby. He was immovable. I found where the boy was, and one day I rushed in before his keeper snatched him up and ran away before they could stop me.

  “My sufferings, subsequently my fruitless efforts to have him fulfill his promise of marriage, his neglect of myself and child, my abduction and violent treatment by his hired tools were truthfully but only partially told in the Buffalo Telegraph of July 21. It would be impossible to cover the events that made up those years of shame, suffering, and degradation forced upon me by Grover Cleveland.”

  A false rumor was making the rounds that Maria was thinking of issuing a statement clearing Cleveland of all charges. When Maria was asked about this, she exploded in anger. The reporter described what happened next. “Maria Halpin drew herself up, as preparing for a supreme effort, and replied in a most impressive and earnest manner, ‘Me, make a statement exonerating Grover Cleveland? Never! I would rather put a bullet through my heart.’”