The president tucked a bundle under his arm, picked up a satchel, and the Clevelands got off at Holland Patent. The Weeds stood only a block from the station, and Cleveland led the way. Rose, looking plump and flushed, met them at the door and welcomed them in. After inspecting the damage from the fire and cleaning up after the long trip from Washington, President Cleveland took a drive with an old friend, Dr. Delos Crane, while Rose showed Frances around the village in her pretty one-horse carriage. At the reigns, Rose proved herself to be an experienced horsewoman, in complete control of the spirited animal. Frances sat in the traverse seat, set back-to-back to Rose. Later in the day, everyone met up at the village cemetery where President Cleveland’s parents were buried beneath a granite tombstone, and for the first time, Frances got to see the family monument to Cleveland’s two brothers who had been lost at sea in 1872.
Rose had big news. She informed the president and her sister-in-law that she had found a new job in New York City, teaching history at Mrs. Sylvania Reed’s School for Girls at 6 East 53rd Street, starting in September.
Mrs. Sylvania Reed was a Mayflower descendant; her father, Albert Gallup, had been a congressman from Albany. All of New York’s elite sent their daughters to Mrs. Reed’s school, and Rose had problems from the outset dealing with the “highbred” student body. She refused to allow the girls to see a production of Shakespeare’s romance, Cymbeline, on grounds that the bedchamber scene in which a Roman soldier tempts Imogen to commit adultery was “utterly unfit for young girls.”
Predictably, Rose also came into conflict with the obstinate Mrs. Reed, who had founded the fashionable school in 1864. The headmistress was already in her sixty-seventh year when she hired Rose for a salary of $100 a month, plus board and lodging. Rose, who absolutely believed she could run things better if she were in charge, made a move to take control of the school. She asked Mrs. Reed to sell it to her, proposing a small down payment and paying out the rest in yearly installments. To this, Mrs. Reed responded that her asking price stood at $200,000 in cash up front. It was a far-fetched amount, well beyond Rose’s reach. That settled things. She resigned after a year.
Once again, Rose was adrift. She considered a vacation in the south of France. Then she settled on Florida, where she would meet the love of her life.
18
THE TRIAL
FRANCES FOLSOM CLEVELAND’S time as the youngest First Lady in American history was brief but unforgettable. Her youth and exquisite beauty earned her the affection of an entire nation. Frances found her image adorning sewing machines, bars of soap, luggage, liver pills, and even tobacco products. Any association with the popular Mrs. Cleveland spiked sales. The commercialization of the First Lady infuriated President Cleveland. When he saw an advertisement featuring his wife’s likeness in the Albany Evening Journal, Cleveland denounced it as “dirty and disreputable.” Frankie Folsom Cleveland clubs sprang up across America, but the president considered the clubs a “perversion” and a waste of time—“a direct menace to the integrity of our homes.”
The memory of the Maria Halpin scandal never ceased to loom. It was the story that would not die. Cleveland seemed to be eternally tainted by his past. Once again, he was facing a whispering campaign.
“The place is full of rumors about Mrs. Cleveland,” wrote Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, a British diplomat stationed in Washington. According to the gossip, Sir Cecil was hearing Frances Cleveland had “fled” Washington because of the president’s loutish behavior. Frances’s maid, so the story went, had been hit on the head with a broomstick when she stepped between Frances and the president. Sir Cecil found the gossip mongering hard to believe. In his opinion, Cleveland was the victim of a political smear campaign.
In December 1887, accounts of domestic violence in the White House started to show up in print. Chauncey Depew, a Yale-educated lawyer who represented Cornelius Vanderbilt’s railroad interests, went public with a story claiming that Frances had gone to the theater one night escorted by a dashing former congressman from Kentucky, Henry Watterson. Supposedly, President Cleveland simmered with jealousy, and when Frances returned to the White House, he went berserk—“called her wicked names and finally slapped her face.” When Watterson was asked about the episode, he begged to differ. By his account, the president had been very gracious and even thanked Watterson for taking the First Lady out to the theater.
Five months later, the Reverend C. H. Pendleton, a Baptist minister from Worcester, Massachusetts, returned from Washington, where he had gone to attend the national Baptist convention, and delivered a shocking sermon. He had had heard stories about President Cleveland, he said, that his congregation needed to hear.
“Mrs. Cleveland had been forcibly abused by her husband,” claimed Pendleton. What’s more, the president’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Folsom, had been “driven from the White House and had gone off to Europe to prevent a further scandal.” Pendleton’s sermon, published in the Worcester Telegram, went nationwide. Cleveland must have felt cursed. Once more, a Baptist clergyman was leading the charge, and this time, the accusation was that he was a wife beater.
Margaret Nicodemus, a factory worker from Worcester, wrote the First Lady, asking whether the stories were true. In the envelope, she enclosed Pendleton’s sermon and an interview he had given the Worcester Telegram. On June 3, Frances sent the following stinging rebuke:
Dear Madam:
I can only say in answer to your letter that every statement made by the Rev. C. H. Pendleton in the interview which you send me is basely false, and I pity the man of his calling who has been made the tool to give circulation to such wicked and heartless lies.
I can wish the women of our country no better blessing than that their homes and their lives may be as happy, and that their husbands may be as kind, as attentive, considerate and affectionate as mine.
With Election Day 1888 just five months off, the last thing Cleveland needed was another reminder of Maria Halpin. Cleveland’s proxies went on the attack. Pendleton found himself depicted as a clueless dandy, said to wear “stylish” layman’s clothes. He was unmarried and “giddy.” According to The New York Times, his “tongue is considerably longer than his judgment.”
Pendleton got the message and quickly began to backpedal. “Of course, I don’t believe these rumors and had no desire to circulate them,” he declared. “I have only the most humble apology to make if I have innocently been the cause of doing the President and Mrs. Cleveland an injury.” He said he had not voted for Cleveland in 1884 but would support him in 1888, but only as penance for having made a “grievous sin.”
Grover Cleveland was renominated by acclamation at the Democratic National Convention in St. Louis. Frankie Cleveland Clubs held rallies across the United States to bring out the vote. The First Lady’s popularity was certainly one of the president’s great political assets. Cleveland’s opponent was Indiana’s Benjamin Harrison, the grandson of William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States, who died in 1841 after serving just thirty-two days in office, the briefest presidency in history. Cleveland, with his wife and mother-in-law, waited for the results in the White House library. At midnight, Secretary of the Navy William Whitney came in with the returns.
“Well, it’s all up,” he told them.
It was a narrow defeat. As in 1884, the outcome hinged on New York, but this time, Cleveland’s home state went for the Republican candidate. Cleveland won the national vote by 90,000, but was beaten in the Electoral College 233 to 168.
After getting a few hours sleep, Dan Lamont found the president at his desk, having just eaten lunch. Cleveland gave his aide a wan smile. He wondered how he had lost his home state.
Lamont frankly replied, “I do not know.”
All Cleveland could do was laugh. He thought he had the answer: “It was mainly because the other party had the most votes.” He advised Lamont not to take it personally. “One party won and the other party has lost—that is all there is to it.” Lamont
observed that the president “never looked more calm or self-possessed.”
Frances said what she was required to say. “I am sorry for the president and, for his sake, wish it had been otherwise, but what cannot be helped must be met.” As the First Lady and her husband pondered what to do next, Emma Folsom gave a candid interview, divulging for the first time intimacies about her daughter’s married life, which had been the subject of so much speculation. Emma had for a spell lived at the White House, assisting Frances in her duties as First Lady, so she knew all about the marriage.
“The president had the greatest blessings in his young wife, and he is in his heart too happy to be long cast down by political fortune. Though older, considerably, than she, he does not permit her to realize it, and her affection for him is extreme.” The marriage was sturdy, Emma said. Frances had found in Cleveland “the tenderness of a father with the devotion of a husband.”
“Mrs. Cleveland looks up to her husband with the trust and confidence she felt as a child in him.” It had to be obvious to anybody reading the interview that Cleveland’s rejection of Emma in favor of her daughter was still galling.
As to the reports that Frances had been the victim of domestic violence, Emma had this to say: “The only comfort I find in the defeat of the president is that the public will have the opportunity to correct some misapprehensions entertained toward him and his wife. He is a peculiar man, but one of the noblest in the world.”
Emma surprised Frances with the announcement that she would be marrying Henry Perrine, a distant cousin and genial widower from Buffalo with three grown children.
President Cleveland came to a decision: He and his wife would settle in Manhattan. Buffalo was not even in consideration. It was, Cleveland told William Vilas, his secretary of the interior, “the place I hate above all others.” He still could not forgive his hometown. Frances supervised the move to New York. The White House attic was a “jungle of gifts” that had to be cleared out, and Cleveland sold off his team of seal brown horses. “I am now eagerly counting the days till March 4, when I shall be free,” he told a confidante. Finally, the time came when Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland had to depart. It was the morning of Benjamin Harrison’s inauguration, March 4, 1889. Frances was coming out of the family living quarters when she saw Jerry Smith, a White House steward. Smith stood as erect as a grenadier and held her handbag out for her.
“Now, Jerry,” Frances told him, “I want you to take good care of all the furniture and ornaments in the house, and not let any of them get lost or broken, for I want to find everything just as it is now, when we come back again.”
Smith was aghast. “Excuse me, Mis’ Cleveland, but just when does you all expect to come back, please—so I can have everything ready, I mean.”
“We’re coming back just four years from today.”
Frances and her husband moved into a four-story brownstone at 816 Madison Avenue near 68th Street, and Cleveland’s faithful servant William Sinclair accompanied them as their butler. Cleveland became of counsel to the blue chip Manhattan law firm Bangs, Stetson, Tracy and McVeigh. Frances supervised the new house and raised funds for Wells College in her spare time, but she found readjustment to civilian life challenging. Her days as the indulged First Lady, when White House stewards catered to her every whim, were over. Her mother offered zero sympathy.
“This will be an opportunity to see if you can run a household by yourself,” Emma acidly informed her.
Emma had told Frances that her wedding ceremony to Henry Perrine would take place in June 1889, but in May came word that Emma and Perrine had gotten married in Jackson, Michigan. When Frances found out, she took off for Michigan to see the newlyweds. Cleveland chose to stay behind in Manhattan.
“Things are getting into a pretty tough condition when a man can’t keep his mother-in-law in the traces,” Cleveland said. He sounded bemused yet also offended.
Tension escalated between mother and daughter. “Why hasn’t Lena sent my corsets,” Emma wrote. Lena was Frances’s maid. Emma scolded Frances for not writing enough; her new stepdaughter, Cornie, she tartly reminded Frances, “is never neglectful of me.”
Even the little things got between them. Emma complained about the size of the coffee cups Frances had given her as a wedding gift. “They hold so little—only half of what an ordinary after dinner coffee cup holds . . . They are very pretty but not exactly practical.” Emma wondered if Frances wouldn’t mind if she exchanged the gift.
On the third anniversary of the Clevelands’ marriage, Emma failed to send them her best wishes.
As Emma and Frances went on squabbling, Cleveland was plotting his political comeback.
Then everything was put on hold.
Cleveland’s future hinged on the outcome of Ball vs. The New York Evening Post.
Six years after the Reverend George Ball filed his libel lawsuit against the New York Evening Post, which had condemned him for his role in the Maria Halpin scandal, the case finally came to trial. The day was February 4, 1890, Justice Charles Daniels presiding. The Buffalo courtroom was packed. With so much at stake in the outcome of the trial, it was the hottest ticket in town. At the plaintiff’s table sat Ball, now seventy-one, and next to him his lawyers, Adelbert Moot and Frank Ferguson.
Three men sat at the defense table. There was the defendant himself, the fifty-nine-year-old editor of the New York Post Edwin L. Godkin, and his two lawyers, John Milburn and Franklin Locke.
Ball and the Post may have been the named parties in the litigation, but no one had more on the line in Ball vs. The Evening Post than Grover Cleveland. Having been defeated for reelection in 1888, he was contemplating another run for the presidency in 1892. Should he win, Cleveland would become the first American president to serve two nonconsecutive terms in the White House. If the jury found for Ball, Cleveland would in all probability be politically finished.
Jury selection took all morning—an unprecedented length of time for voir dire in a trial that did not involve a capital offense. So many challenges were raised that Moot and Milburn came close to exhausting the pool of potential jurors. Finally, just before noon, the last man was named, and the panel was sworn in.
Moot rose and presented his opening statement. Moot was thirty-six, with a reputation as a plain-speaking and unrelenting advocate for his clients, which may explain his readiness to take on the former president who still commanded so much influence over the Buffalo bar.
Moot began with a brief history of Grover Cleveland’s whirlwind political career—his election as mayor, governor, and then while still a newcomer to the national political arena, his nomination as the Democratic candidate for president. George Ball had learned of “certain charges,” the upshot of which was the publication in 1884 of “A Terrible Tale” in the Buffalo Evening Telegraph. Moot went to the plaintiff’s table and stood over Ball. The New York Post had published wicked and malicious articles about his client, Moot told the jurors, written with the intent of destroying Ball as payback for his role in exposing the Maria Halpin scandal. He read from one of the Post’s articles:
The accounts of Mr. Ball, “the highly respected Baptist minister” who wrote the filthy and disingenuous letters which appeared in the Boston Journal about Governor Cleveland continue to grow worse. He appears indeed to be a sort of politico-clerical adventurer. He is not a Baptist minister at all, a leading Baptist minister in the City informs us, but a Free-will Baptist.
He has wandered about a good deal, being various things by turn and nothing long. He once had a place in the Custom House, and has tried his hand at Journalism in this City, was once in Owensville, Indiana, from which place, the Indianapolis Sentinel says, “he had to depart hastily, owing to an ‘insult to a Christian lady.” In Buffalo, he seems to have been running a little independent machine of his own, the services of which he has been offered for money to both parties indiscriminately, and not much money either, for he takes as little as $25.00 at a time. Moreover, he has as we are i
nformed, a remarkable detective love of ferreting out low and disgusting scandals and mysteries.
This article was published on August 8, 1884.
Moot read to the jurors the next attack by the Post, published three days later. It accused Ball of concocting “extremely disgusting” stories about Cleveland and having a “passion for notoriety which seems to be his most powerful motive.”
The last allegedly libelous article, Moot told the jurors, was published the next day under the headline, “The Rev. Mr. Ball and His Kind.” It reported the results of the independent investigation by sixteen prominent citizens of Buffalo who had cleared Cleveland of wrongdoing in the Halpin matter. In this story, the Post called Ball and his supporters “guttersnipes,” among other choice words.
What shall be said of the vampires, clerical and others, who have been exploring the haunts of infamy to find material for blackening private character and bringing sorrow to households in no way concerned in the present political campaign? It is the common characteristic of such rascals that they care no more for the feelings of innocent persons than a dynamiter who plants a bomb in the waiting-room of a railroad station thronged with women and children, in order to strike terror in the hearts of other people who are out of danger miles away.
They have exposed themselves as persons of depraved taste and imagination as well as liars by instinct. They have done all this without accomplishing the end they had in view, which was to hold Governor Cleveland up as a habitual profligate, a hardened criminal, a deliberate betrayer of women, and a monster of cruelty to the victims of his depravity.
Until the publication of these articles, Moot continued, no one had questioned Ball’s standing as a “God-fearing Christian minister and gentleman.” The articles, he said, had “wounded” Ball’s reputation, “crippled” his work as a teacher and minister, and led to his “utter ruin.”
A Secret Life: The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland Page 32