“The Cleveland pew was third in front of ours,” recalled Jean Davis. “The broad back of the ex-president had long been familiar to me. So now his place was taken by a younger, less corpulent man, with shiny black hair, who wore a shepherd’s plaid suit to church in an era when we were accustomed to gentlemen who dressed in Sunday morning formality.” Another source of umbrage for Jean Davis was the unpleasant realization that Preston had failed to correct his profile in Who’s Who in America that erroneously identified him as a professor of archeology at Princeton, when his only association with the university was that of alumnus. Another ingredient of Preston’s quirky character was that he was fond of crocheting. Needlework was a pastime he shared with Frances; the moment she’d pull out her knitting, Preston would reach for his crochet. A man’s man in the Grover Cleveland mode Preston was not.
Preston stepped into his new social life with ease. Two weeks after he’d resigned from Wells College, he was at Frances’s side when Esther Cleveland presented herself to society. President Taft feted the couple at a White House dinner. (Frances held back tears when they were shown the Blue Room, where she had married Grover Cleveland nearly thirty years before.)
Frances’s wedding to Preston took place on February 10, 1913, at the home of Princeton University’s president. It was a small affair, nothing like her White House wedding, with only a handful of guests present, including her servants. Frances walked into the main drawing room wearing a white silk gown and carrying a bouquet of her favorite flower, white Killarney roses. Preston’s father gave her away. The 10:30 a.m. ceremony, followed by a wedding breakfast, had been so hurriedly arranged that Frances’s son, Richard, a student at Phillips Andover Academy, could not make it in time. The three other Cleveland children were in attendance, though it seemed to Jean Davis that a brick wall of antipathy had been erected between Preston and his youngest stepson, nine-year-old Francis.
The reason that had been given for the hasty ceremony was said to be the groom’s physical condition; he was reported by Frances to be “very ill,” ordered by his doctor to spend the winter in Florida for reasons of health. However, several of the guests could not help but notice how nimbly he ducked under a shower of rice when he slid his lean six-foot frame into Grover Cleveland’s old steel-grey motor car and drove off with Frances. His bearing, according to one observer, didn’t seem to be “that of a man who needed to go to Florida for his health.”
After Frances remarried, she took up the cause of ensuring President Cleveland’s place in history and devoted the rest of her life to it. She was the keeper of the flame, standing guard over her late husband’s papers and granting access to them only to those historians in the academic establishment who could assure her of their devotion to the man’s greatness.
The first authorized biography, Recollections of Grover Cleveland , by George F. Parker, was published in 1909, the year after Cleveland’s death. Parker had been a loyal political aide who Cleveland had appointed U.S. consul in Birmingham, England. Every word of his book was written with reverence and regard for the late president. According to Parker, Cleveland was “a good and pure man in his private and domestic life.” Like all hagiographies, Parker’s Recollections offered a one-dimensional portrait of the man. How did Parker deal with the Maria Halpin scandal? He ignored it. Even so, Frances, who had been granted complete editorial control of the book, found some things in it that she didn’t appreciate.
“I went over his book before it was published,” Frances confided to her late husband’s private secretary, William Gorham Rice. She had hacked away at some of the language, Frances said, and “cut out a good deal.”
Exalted men require big biographies, and in Robert McNutt McElroy, a distinguished professor of history at Princeton University, Frances believed she had found the perfect collaborator. The Princeton connection aside, Frances and McElroy were also friends. McElroy served with her on the board of trustees at Wells College, and in 1913, she recruited the historian for the presidency of Wells, an offer he declined. Frances gave McElroy her complete endorsement of his Cleveland biography and called on all her late husband’s colleagues to cooperate with him. McElroy commenced work in 1919, and the two-volume Grover Cleveland: The Man and the Statesman was published in 1923. In its 786 pages, there is not one mention of Maria Halpin. McElroy alludes to the scandal only in this roundabout way. “When his friend, Charles W. Goodyear, reported that a particularly violent attack was to be made upon him by the enemy press the following day, regarding an incident in his earlier life, and asked what to say in reply, Cleveland telegraphed: ‘Whatever you say, tell the truth.’ And his friends told the truth.”
In 1932, the historian Allan Nevins published his biography of Grover Cleveland. Nevins taught at Columbia University and wrote more than fifty books during his celebrated career, his most acclaimed work, the epic eight-volume Civil War history Ordeal of the Union. But the book that won him the first of two Pulitzer Prizes was Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage. In his preface, the first person Nevins thanks is Cleveland’s widow, “who threw open his papers and gave invaluable advice.”
Unlike McElroy, Nevins chose not to ignore the scandal, understanding that for the sake of his credibility, it had to be dealt with. He tackled it head-on, but with the unmitigated vilification of Maria Halpin that set the tone for all historians to come. According to Nevins’s account, the Evening Telegraph was a “despised Buffalo rag” whose article, “A Terrible Tale,” was garnished “with unctuous detail” and revealed nothing more than that Cleveland had once “maintained a connection with a Buffalo woman named Halpin whose illegitimate son was later placed in an orphan asylum.”
“After reciting the initial charges, the Telegraph gradually added a series of allegations venomous in their falsity.” Nevins wrote that these accusations emanated from the owners of “saloons and dives” who were out to get Cleveland for his clean-government crusade to root out corruption in Buffalo. As for George Ball, Nevins says the Baptist minister “made himself a national nuisance,” and by posing as “Buffalo’s exponent of decency, he actually gave currency to indecent falsehood.”
In the Nevins book, Cleveland makes a common sense decision in decreeing that his associates tell the truth because “from the truth he had little to fear.” Maria Halpin, Nevins concludes, was a sexual plaything, passed around among the leading lawyers of Buffalo, a harlot who drank to excess and neglected her illegitimate son Oscar. Uncertain about the identity of the father, she fixed on Cleveland because he was the only bachelor among her paramours and “she hoped to make him marry her.” Cleveland did not question paternity because “the other men in the scrape were married.”
“A weaker or more callous man in his place would have tried to, with some prospect of success, deny responsibility for the child; but Cleveland saw the matter through in the most courageous way.” Cleveland, concludes Nevins, “never flinched” and his “subsequent indifference to the child was due to his doubts about his fatherhood.” Put another way, Cleveland conducted himself selflessly, and the Halpin scandal was a high mark in Cleveland’s long life of personal integrity.
When Frances completed reading Nevins’s work, apart from some minor reservations, she pronounced herself satisfied, as well she should have been. It offered, she said, a “true picture—of the man and his meaning.”
To this day, Nevins’s work is regarded as the definitive Cleveland biography. Every subsequent Cleveland book has trod the path he set down. But as we have seen, this time-honored version of the scandal borders on being a fairy tale. And the falsehoods continue to this day. In 2008, when the tabloid National Enquirer revealed that a love child had been born to Rielle Hunter and Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, New York Times columnist Gail Collins noted how it was “weirdly reminiscent” of what Grover Cleveland had experienced, in that a “scurrilous newspaper from his hometown of Buffalo accused him of being the father of a love child born to Maria Halpin, a store clerk. Sh
e later took to drink, and Cleveland, a bachelor, arranged to have the baby adopted by friends.
“It probably wasn’t Cleveland’s child. . . . But Cleveland stolidly refused to defend himself . . . ”
Gail Collins does not merit any blame for recapitulating this fundamentally dishonest account of the Halpin scandal. It is, after all, how so many esteemed historians have presented it. It is said that history is written by the victors, which certainly holds true in the defamation of Maria Halpin.
In October 1946, an extraordinary spectacle took place in Princeton, New Jersey. Under a brilliant October sun, several hundred of the world’s leading scholars, dressed in vividly colored academic robes representing the foremost universities in the United States and Europe, paraded through the campus of Princeton University. It was Princeton’s bicentennial celebration, and in the long line of intellectuals who were to receive honorary degrees in science, law, and letters were some of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr was there. So was Trygve Lie, the secretary-general of the United Nations, and the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Linus Pauling.
At a dinner celebrating the event, President Harry Truman, his daughter Margaret, and the new army chief of staff, General Dwight David Eisenhower, were all seated at the head table, along with another dignitary—a white-haired old lady nearing the end of her days. Frances Folsom Cleveland Preston had been diagnosed with cataracts, and she was told that she might lose her sight. She accepted her fate and had begun to learn Braille and prepare herself for progressive blindness when an operation mercifully restored her vision. Time had ravaged the former First Lady of the United States, although it could not erase the essence of her graciousness. Even in old age, she remained a beautiful and self-assured woman.
Mrs. Preston was introduced to General Eisenhower. It was sometimes forgotten that Mrs. Preston had once been Mrs. Grover Cleveland. At some point during their conversation, she remarked that she had once lived in Washington. Eisenhower was intrigued.
“You did?” he asked. “Where?”
One year later, Frances died in her sleep.
EPILOGUE
AND SO WE come to the fate of Oscar Folsom Cleveland, the bastard child of Grover Cleveland and Maria Halpin. For more than a century, mystery has shrouded his life story. One enduring myth was that he became an alcoholic and died homeless somewhere in upstate New York. The truth of what happened to Oscar can at last be answered in this book.
Records show that Oscar was born September 14, 1874, at a hospital for unwed mothers. At age two, he was taken by force from his mother’s arms and thrown into an orphanage. Although his formal legal adoption papers have been sealed in perpetuity, we know from contemporary accounts that he was taken in by the physician James E. King and his wife Sarah. They gave Oscar a new name—James E. King Jr.—and raised him in a fine house with a picket fence at 93 Niagara Street in Buffalo.
James E. King Jr.’s life after that was exceptional and productive. Like his adoptive father, he became a doctor. In 1896, he graduated from the University of Buffalo School of Medicine and then pursued postgraduate studies in Munich, London, and Dresden. When he returned to Buffalo in 1898, he became a pioneer in the field of gynecology when it was rare for a physician to specialize in women’s medicine; in all of Buffalo, there were only three doctors practicing gynecology. King was a cautious healer who was said to be unusually devoted to his patients. He also took on numerous charity cases. Not surprisingly, considering the circumstances of his birth, King was a zealous enthusiast of the work of Charles Dickens, the great English writer. The story of the orphan boy Oliver Twist must surely have resonated with him. King even set up a Dickens Room in his house in which wallpaper and every piece of artwork and furniture depicted characters from Dickens’s novels.
King was devoted to his adoptive mother, Sarah, who outlived her husband by thirty-five years. She and her son lived together until her death in 1923. No matter the sinful manner by which the Kings came to adopt James, they were good parents to him.
King married once, in 1910 when he was thirty-five. His bride was Rose Weber, a German-born divorcee who had a seventeen-year-old son. The marriage did not last the decade, and they had no children, but King went on to live a full if lonely life. He enjoyed horseback riding, a favorite pastime, loved opera, and had an excellent art collection. Dr. King traveled to Europe seven times during his life, chiefly to attend lectures and medical conventions. For fourteen years, he was a professor of gynecology at the University of Buffalo School of Medicine.
The doctor had a devoted household staff that attended to all his comforts, but as an employer, he had some quirks. Saimi Pratt worked as his cook and live-in housekeeper for five years, but when she got married, he told her that her services were no longer required. It was King’s policy to have only single women working for him. The cook bore him no hard feelings and in fact thought so highly of him that his picture hung in her house long after he had dismissed her. The feeling was mutual; James King generously gave her $500 for her son’s education.
Dr. Milton Kahn, a promising young gynecologist, became King’s protégé. He and his bride, Ruth, were favored Sunday guests at King’s stately home at 1255 Delaware Avenue, a fivebedroom colonial decorated in high-end Kittinger furniture. Sunday dinners with King were formal events, with the fullcourse meal starting at one in the afternoon. Ruth Kahn found herself somewhat intimidated in his presence. “I was a new bride and very nervous. I listened more than I talked,” she recalled. Back in 1938, when the Kahns were newlyweds, there were rumors that King was Grover Cleveland’s out-of-wedlock son, but understandably, the couple never once raised the subject with him. Gossip about James King’s heritage persisted into his old age. It is an interesting footnote that notwithstanding his biological father’s historic importance to the Democratic Party, King was a Republican.
King was active until the end. In 1946, at age seventy, he attended a medical conference in faraway Peru. On March 9, 1947, he died at home. Preserving his privacy to the end, he told his nurse the day before his death, “If anyone calls, just say I am improving.” A funeral procession took his coffin to the King family plot in Warren, Pennsylvania, where he was buried next to his adoptive parents. So far as is known, he never reached out to Maria Halpin, or she to him.
Dr. King’s will was a carefully thought out document. All his possessions were doled out with a purpose. To his medical school he left the considerable sum of $480,000, plus Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, the world’s first encyclopedia. The treasured work remains at Buffalo University to this day. King also remembered Dr. Kahn, bequeathing his protégé ten needles of radium. In those days, gynecologists in private practice had to have their own source of radium, which was used to treat ovarian cancer by injection of the radioactive element directly into the cancerous tissue.
King showed remarkable generosity to Mary Meek, a nurse who cared for Sarah King in the final years of her life. In recognition of her devotion to his mother, he permitted Ms. Meek to live at his home for six months without rent and bequeathed her all his household furnishings and a monthly income for the rest of her life. Other people who were special in his life were also remembered in his will. To his former laundress, he left $500. A poor patient’s six-year-old son was given $500 for his education.
But to the very end, Dr. James E. King Jr., born Oscar Folsom Cleveland, kept the family secrets.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
RESEARCHING A Secret Life has been a challenge. Published biographies of Grover Cleveland have whitewashed the Maria Halpin scandal or treated it only superficially. As happens occasionally to authors, there came a eureka moment for me when I realized I had found a treasure trove of material that previous writers had overlooked. These were the court proceedings of the 1890 libel trial of Ball v. The New York Evening Post Corporation. For the first and only time, many of the key people connected to the scandal were compelled t
o testify under oath about what they knew of Maria Halpin and Grover Cleveland. I found these records in the archives of the New York State Appellate Division, Fourth Department Law Library, in Rochester, New York. Although Maria Halpin was never called as a witness at the Ball trial, I also obtained her handwritten affidavits, sworn to in October 1884, when the attacks on her character compelled her to go public with her version of events.
Grover Cleveland’s lifetime of correspondence has been collected by the historian Allan Nevins and published in the Letters of Grover Cleveland, 1850–1908. The letters, particularly those written in the 1850s, offer priceless detail of time and place when Cleveland was on the cusp of manhood. The Cleveland Papers at the Library of Congress were another vital source of information for the White House years. Fortunately, the papers and correspondence of several key Cleveland aides who were involved in managing the Maria Halpin crisis—including Horatio C. King, Wilson Bissell, and Daniel Lamont—have been preserved in the Library of Congress and various archives and special collections. Allan Nevins also left much of his research into the life of Grover Cleveland archived at Columbia University.
Maria Halpin’s family put into my hands cherished family photographs passed down through the generations. No photograph of Maria Halpin has ever previously been published. With A Secret Life, we finally get a look at this woman who I believe has been terribly disparaged in history. I especially want to thank two of Maria Halpin’s direct descendants, Emogene Sweeney and Jennifer Hawkins, for guiding me through their family history and encouraging me in my research and writing so that Maria Halpin’s story could finally be told.
A Secret Life: The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland Page 37