The President Is a Sick Man

by Matthew Algeo

  Steve rented a cheap room in a boardinghouse near the firm and threw himself into his studies with a zeal that bordered on the obsessive, often reading until two or three in the morning.

  It seems Steve had just two pastimes outside work. One was politics. In the fall of 1858, Cleveland, now twenty-one and old enough to vote, began volunteering for the local Democratic Party. Mostly he just helped get out the vote on Election Day. Why, precisely, he chose to become a Democrat is a bit of a mystery. As an old man he would say it was because the Democrats represented “greater solidity and conservatism” than the fledgling Republican Party. But it also might have had something to do with the fact that the three partners at Rogers, Bowen, and Rogers were all committed Democrats.

  Steve’s other pastime was partying. On those nights he wasn’t staying up late reading law, he often patronized the saloons along Canal Street, where he could be found with a cigar in his mouth and a frothing mug of beer in his hand, leading his working-class German and Irish friends in bawdy songs. His favorite haunts were Diebold’s, Schwabl’s, Gillick’s, and Louis Goetz’s. On hot summer nights, he was likely to be spotted at Schenkelberger’s or one of the city’s other German beer gardens, where sawdust covered the floor and not much covered the pretty young fräuleins who kept his stein filled. Sometimes, he later admitted, his carousing would cause him to “lose a day.” He was, generally speaking, a happy drunk, though he had a notoriously short temper that occasionally erupted. One night he was arguing politics with an acquaintance named Mike Falvey. The argument escalated into fisticuffs and ended when Cleveland “knocked Falvey into the gutter” on Seneca Street. Afterward the combatants patched things up over beers at Gillick’s. In the opinion of his straitlaced uncle, Lewis Allen, Grover spent far too much time with “queer folk.”

  It was as if he had a split personality. There was the dour, disciplined law student and the fun-loving party animal. “There were always two Clevelands,” writes Allan Nevins. “To the end of his life his intimates were struck by the gulf which separated the exuberant, jovial Cleveland of occasional hours of carefree banter, and the stern, unbending Cleveland of work and responsibility, whose life seemed hung round by a pall of duty.”

  In May 1859, after three and a half years of study, Stephen Grover Cleveland was admitted to the bar by the New York Supreme Court. He was twenty-two. Around this time, he decided to start going by Grover instead of Steve. As a law clerk he’d begun signing his name S. Grover Cleveland. Then he dropped the “S” altogether. Legend has it that he wanted his name to sound “more sonorous and distinctive.” But to his family and to his friends in Buffalo, he would always remain Steve.

  Grover stayed on at Rogers, Bowen, and Rogers, and was soon earning more than a $1,000 a year at a time when the average workingman was making only about $400.

  In October 1862, an elderly Democrat named Cyrenius Torrance was elected Erie County district attorney. Cleveland was asked to be his assistant. It meant a big pay cut—the position paid just $500 a year— but Grover did not hesitate to accept the offer. He had decided to pursue a career in politics and regarded the position as a launching pad.

  By now the Civil War was in its full fury, and in July 1863, Cleveland was drafted. That he was a loyal Unionist is indisputable; he was a “War Democrat” and may have even voted for Lincoln in 1864. But— occasional street fights notwithstanding—Cleveland had no stomach for battle, and the cause did not excite him. His position on slavery was ambiguous. Perhaps it was his Maryland-born mother’s influence, but Grover was not known to be an ardent abolitionist.

  Besides, he was still supporting his mother and two younger sisters, one of whom was now in college. Of his three brothers, one was already serving in the Union Army, and another had just been mustered out. Neither could afford to send money home. The third was a poorly paid Presbyterian minister. In Grover’s opinion, military service was not an option. And there was a way out.

  The Conscription Act of March 3, 1863, permitted draftees to avoid service by either furnishing a substitute or paying a “commutation fee” of $300. It was, inevitably, a controversial provision. Most workingmen could not afford to hire a substitute or pay the fee, which amounted to roughly 75 percent of their annual wages. German and Irish laborers were particularly aggrieved. They saw little to be gained by fighting for the freedom of the slaves, many of whom, they felt, would only come north and compete with them for jobs.

  The Conscription Act stoked racial animosities that flared into violence in several Northern cities. In Buffalo, a white mob savagely beat and killed two African Americans in rioting on July 6, 1863. (Coincidentally, John Wilkes Booth was in town that week, performing at the Metropolitan Theatre.) In New York City a week later, a white mob burned

  a black orphanage to the ground. The orphans escaped with their lives, fortunately, but at least 120 other people in the city were killed over several days of rioting.

  Instead of paying the $300 commutation fee to get out of the draft, Grover Cleveland found a substitute, a Great Lakes sailor named George Benninsky (or Brinske). Benninsky was an illiterate Polish immigrant who had come to the United States in 1851. Cleveland was acquainted with him through a friend named George Reinhart. Benninsky agreed to be Cleveland’s substitute for $150, which was the going rate for substitutes in Buffalo at the time. It was a perfectly legal transaction. In fact, as Cleveland himself later pointed out, he could have paid much less. “Indeed,” he wrote, “being then the assistant district attorney of Erie County, I had abundant opportunity to secure without expense a substitute from discharged convicts and from friendless persons accused of crime if I had wished to do so.” On July 6, 1863—the day of the Buffalo draft riots—George Benninsky enlisted in the Seventy-Sixth New York. Years later, there would be rumors that Benninsky had suffered horrors in Cleveland’s stead, but the truth is prosaic. After serving briefly and uneventfully at Rappahannock, Benninsky hurt his back. He spent the rest of the war as an orderly in Washington military hospitals.

  Cleveland’s elderly boss did not run for reelection in 1865, and Cleveland, as expected, won the Democratic nomination for district attorney. His Republican opponent was Lyman K. Bass, who happened to be one of Cleveland’s drinking buddies—and his roommate. For the campaign they mutually pledged that each would imbibe no more than four glasses of lager daily. But one night they exceeded their allowance, and Bass proposed they “anticipate” their future allotment. “Grover,” Bass said at the end of the night, “do you know we have anticipated the whole campaign?” The next night Grover produced two huge tankards to stand in for their glasses.

  Democratic papers confidently predicted Cleveland’s victory. “He is a young man, who, by his unaided exertions, has gained a high position at the bar, and whose character is above reproach,” the Buffalo Courier said. “He will be supported by hundreds of Republicans on these grounds.”

  But it was not to be. Cleveland carried the city’s German and Irish wards, but Bass trounced him in the Yankee suburbs. Cleveland lost the election, though Bass probably picked up the tab for beers on election night.

  Cleveland returned to private practice. Among his law partners at this time was Oscar Folsom, a former assistant U.S. attorney who was Cleveland’s closest friend. The two men were nearly identical in age and temperament, hard workers who enjoyed a not infrequent tipple. When Folsom’s daughter Frances was born in 1864, Cleveland had bought her a baby carriage and doted on her as if she were his own.

  In 1870, Cleveland ran as the Democratic nominee for Erie County sheriff. It was a curious decision, for the position was not especially prestigious. But Grover was itching to get back into politics. He won the election by just 303 votes.

  It was, in many ways, a thankless job. Buffalo was still a very rough place, and Grover was occasionally obliged to incarcerate acquaintances from the saloons he still frequented, albeit more discreetly. He was also obliged to carry out hangings, a task he found distasteful in the ex
treme. Though he did not oppose capital punishment, he was not by temperament vengeful or bloodthirsty. His mother urged him to assign a deputy to pull the lever that released the trapdoor underneath the condemned, as he easily could have done, but he said he could assign no man such a “hateful task.” On the two occasions it was required, he pulled the lever himself.

  As sheriff, Cleveland cracked down on graft. He personally measured the amount of firewood delivered to the jail, ensuring that it was the contracted quantity. He inspected the flour and oatmeal to ensure that it was of sufficient quality. He came to be known as incorruptible.

  Cleveland won high praise for his performance as sheriff, but when his term ended in 1873, he did not run for reelection. Perhaps he found some of the obligations of the office too unseemly. In any event, he seems to have abandoned his dreams of a political career. Now thirty-six, he returned to the practice of law. His office was on the second floor of the Weed Block, an ugly building on the corner of Main and Swan Streets. Though he had amassed considerable savings by now and easily could have afforded a mansion in the suburbs, he still lived in a small apartment in the center of the city.

  He specialized in civil litigation, and over the years his reputation grew. One of his clients was Standard Oil. In the courtroom he was methodical, never showy. His goal was not merely victory but a fair and just outcome for all parties. One colleague said he radiated a “quintessential integrity” and “everybody felt it.” One judge before whom Cleveland argued many cases said he was “an exceedingly dangerous antagonist.” It came to be widely assumed that Cleveland himself would someday ascend to the bench—perhaps even a seat on the state supreme court.

  Grover continued to enjoy Buffalo’s boisterous nightlife. Two or three nights a week he could still be found inside in a saloon. He never cooked for himself, instead taking all his meals in restaurants or rooming houses. German food was his favorite. Though he remained a Presbyterian, clearly he was not a rabid one. On a given Sunday he was more likely to be found in a pool hall than a pew. Years later he would cheerfully admit of his Buffalo years that he “had not been a saint.” Still a bachelor, he was discreet about his romantic interests and kept his distance from the city’s belles. He told his sisters he thought of getting married “a good many times.” “And the more I think of it,” he continued, “the more I think I’ll not do it.” Another time he told his sisters, rather cryptically, “I’m only waiting for my wife to grow up.”

  In all his years in Buffalo, Grover is known to have had just one serious relationship. It was with a vivacious and intelligent department store clerk named Maria Crofts Halpin. Maria was a thirty-three-year-old widow when she moved to Buffalo in 1871. She spoke French, attended one of the city’s upper-class churches, and, as Allan Nevins delicately puts it, “she accepted the attentions of several men”—including Grover.

  On September 14, 1874, Halpin gave birth to a son, whom she named Oscar Folsom Cleveland. Halpin identified Cleveland as the father. Cleveland, then thirty-seven, single, and well employed, did not admit paternity but did agree to provide for the child. The curious name that Halpin gave the baby—Oscar Folsom was Grover’s law partner and best friend, after all—seems to suggest that she herself wasn’t certain who the father was. One theory holds that Folsom was the father, but, since he was married, Halpin named Cleveland, hoping he would propose to her. And if Folsom was the father, the theory goes, Cleveland agreed to accept responsibility for the child to spare his friend the embarrassment and scandal of an unintended and illegitimate son. In any event, Cleveland did not propose marriage, and Halpin was left to raise the child alone. She began drinking heavily and was committed to an asylum for the “mentally deranged.” The child was sent to an orphanage, and Cleveland, true to his word, paid the bill: five dollars a week.

  After she was released from the asylum, Halpin unsuccessfully attempted to regain custody of the child. In desperation she kidnapped him from the orphanage. The child was soon recovered and eventually was adopted by a well-to-do family. Maria Halpin left Buffalo and remarried. (According to Nevins, the child grew up to become a “distinguished professional man,” though other reports suggest he drank himself to death at an early age. His identity has never been publicly disclosed, but if he has any living descendents, DNA testing might clear up the lingering paternity question once and for all.)

  Naturally, what Grover referred to as his “woman scrape” was the subject of much gossip in Buffalo, and once he became a national figure, it was inevitable that the story would surface in the papers.

  Less than a year after the birth of the Halpin baby, Oscar Folsom was killed in a gruesome accident. He was returning home from a friend’s house when his buggy collided with a wagon that was parked in front of a saloon on Niagara Street. Folsom was thrown to the ground and crushed under the wheels of his buggy. He suffered a fractured skull and massive internal injuries. Less than two hours later, he died. He was thirty-seven. Cleveland was working in his apartment when he heard the news that his best friend was dead. He could hardly believe it, and it would take him a long time to recover from the loss. Cleveland was named the executor of Folsom’s estate, and he came to feel a special obligation to Folsom’s widow and her eleven-year-old daughter Frances.

  By the time he was forty, Grover’s fondness for beer and bratwurst had begun to affect his physique. His weight approached 250 pounds, and his friends called him Big Steve. His nieces and nephews nicknamed him Uncle Jumbo. Self-assured as he was, neither moniker troubled him in the least. His only sources of exercise were hunting and fishing, pursuits he considered almost religious; true sportsmen, he believed, “appreciate the goodness of the Supreme Power who has made and beautified Nature’s abiding-place.” He didn’t even like to walk, a task he considered “among the dreary and unsatisfying things in life.” He joined the Beaver Island Club, an outdoor sports club on an island in the Niagara. On some outings he brought along chubby little “Frankie” Folsom, his late friend’s daughter.

  It was a comfortable life, and Cleveland seemed content.

  At noon on March 4, 1881, James Garfield was sworn in as president, continuing a Republican stranglehold on the White House that stretched back to Lincoln’s first inauguration twenty years earlier. It was a Thursday, so Grover Cleveland was undoubtedly hard at work. That night he might have read newspaper reports of the inauguration at one of his favorite watering holes. Still a loyal Democrat but disengaged from party politics, he fervently longed for the day that a Democrat would return to the White House. He could not have imagined—no one could have imagined—that, in exactly four years, a Democrat would return to the White House and that it would be Grover Cleveland himself.

  In those four years Cleveland was swept up in a whirlwind that carried him, sometimes reluctantly, from the pleasant obscurity of his Buffalo law practice to the unimaginable pressures of the highest office in the land. His rise was more rapid and unlikely than that of any other chief executive. It was attributable, of course, to Cleveland’s personal and political skills. But it was also attributable to the fact that, as Allan Nevins puts it, “the stars were with him.” Garfield was assassinated and died after just two hundred days in office, reconfiguring the political landscape in ways that would prove advantageous to Cleveland. And by the next presidential election, Cleveland himself would be a figure of national renown.

  By 1881, Buffalo’s municipal government had grown unconscionably corrupt. Aldermen openly accepted kickbacks for city contracts. A succession of mayors, both Republicans and Democrats, merely turned a blind eye. Voters were outraged. After the Republicans nominated a business-as-usual candidate for mayor, the Democrats began fishing around for an “aggressively honest” candidate. Many were considered before Cleveland, but none was willing to sacrifice his career for a position that paid just $2,500 annually (and in which he was not expected to profit from graft). Cleveland, who had amassed savings in excess of $70,000, could afford to run, and he had a reputat
ion for unshakable honesty. He was arguing a case before Judge Albert Haight when a committee of Democratic officials interrupted the proceedings to formally offer Cleveland the nomination. Cleveland approached the bench.

  “This is a committee from the Democratic city convention,” he said to Haight, “and they want to nominate me for mayor. . . . What shall I do about it?”

  “The mayoralty is an honorable position,” answered the judge. “You’re an old bachelor. You haven’t any family to take care of. I’d advise you to accept.”

  Cleveland took the judge’s advice. In his letter of acceptance he wrote, “Public officials are trustees of the people.” A reporter later paraphrased Cleveland: “Public office is a public trust.” It would become his mantra.

  Cleveland won the election with 57 percent of the vote.

  Once in office, Cleveland vetoed so many wasteful spending bills that he came to be known as the veto mayor. Most famously he vetoed a street-cleaning contract that would have gone to the highest bidder, a firm that bid $422,500—$109,000 more than the next highest bid. The difference, presumably, was to be divided among the aldermen. In his veto message, Cleveland called the contract “a most bare-faced, impudent, and shameless scheme to betray the interests of the people, and to worse than squander the public money.” It was the kind of plain talk that would come to characterize Cleveland’s political career. Indeed, as mayor, Cleveland’s political persona burst into full flower. He was blunt, outspoken, honest. And he exuded a peculiar charisma. With his massive physique and booming voice, he seemed larger than life. Yet there was also something almost delicate about him. “In his movements Mr. Cleveland is deliberate, dignified, and graceful,” the New York Times said of the mayor.