The President Is a Sick Man

by Matthew Algeo

  As the disease progressed, it became impossible for Grant and his doctors to conceal the fact that Grant had cancer. Newspapers began a morbid deathwatch outside Grant’s townhouse on East Sixty-Sixth Street, near Central Park. Reporters rented a house nearby and worked in shifts around the clock. Grant received a stream of well-wishers, each of whom was ambushed by reporters eager for some tidbit of information. Generally the newspaper reports were more fanciful than factual, and, in keeping with the journalistic standards of the day, many were total fabrications. One of the less credible reports claimed that in the middle of one night the general shouted out, “I can’t stand it! I’m going to die!”

  As he sank closer to death, Grant’s illness was covered with a fervor verging on hysteria, with vivid reports detailing each “violent and alarming fit of coughing” in clinical detail. Never before had a famous American’s battle with cancer been so thoroughly documented. It was the nineteenth-century equivalent of wall-to-wall coverage. A few of the bolder newspapers even used the word “cancer” itself.

  The intense coverage of Grant’s cancer did nothing to alleviate the public’s fear of the disease. In fact, it only confirmed what was already widely believed: cancer was a killer that could not be stopped, “an alien and living invader.” Or, as the New York Tribune put it, “a genuine case of malignant cancer is incurable.”

  General Grant’s death was agonizing. The tumor slowly enlarged, making it impossible for him to swallow, to eat, and, eventually, to breathe. His body withered away. He lost a hundred pounds, nearly half his healthy weight. By June he was unable to speak and could only communicate by handwriting. He scrawled messages in pencil on brown slips of paper, many of which survive. Some of the notes are poignant. “I should prefer going now to enduring my present suffering for a single day without hope of recovery,” says one. “I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun,” says another. “A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer; I signify all three.”

  All the while, as he slowly suffocated, Grant raced furiously to complete his memoirs. In May 1884—the month before he bit into that peach—Grant had been swindled out of his life savings by a Wall Street con artist. To provide for his family after he was gone, Grant had agreed to sell the rights to his memoirs to Mark Twain. On the afternoon of July 19, 1885, Grant finished writing.* A few hours later, he wrote a letter to Dr. Douglas. “There is nothing more I should do to it now,” he wrote, referring to his memoirs, “and therefore I am not likely to be more ready to go than at this moment.”

  An illustration depicting the death of Ulysses Grant on July 23, 1885. Grant’s slow, agonizing death from cancer was exhaustively covered by newspapers. Never before had a famous American’s battle with the disease been so thoroughly documented. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  Less than four days later, on the morning of July 23, he died in his bed surrounded by his family and his doctors. “There was no expiring sigh,” Dr. Douglas remembered. “Life passed away so quietly, so peacefully, that, to be sure it had terminated, we waited a minute.”

  Grover Cleveland, who had begun his first term less than five months earlier, issued a proclamation. “The entire country has witnessed with deep emotion his prolonged and patient struggle with painful disease,” Cleveland wrote, “and has watched by his couch of suffering with tearful sympathy.”

  Grant’s funeral on August 8 in New York was one of the most spectacular outpourings of grief in history. An estimated 1.5 million people watched the seven-mile-long cortege slowly make its way from City Hall, up Broadway and Fifth Avenue, to Riverside Park. Black bunting hung from nearly every building along the route. General Winfield Scott Hancock, the hero of Gettysburg, led the procession, which lasted seven hours and included some sixty thousand marchers, including thousands of Civil War veterans. Men climbed telegraph poles just to catch a glimpse of Grant’s catafalque as it passed. As Grant had wished, it was a reconciliatory event. Among the pallbearers were two Union generals and two Confederate generals. “I am sorry General Grant is dead,” said Simon Bolivar Buckner, one of the Confederate pallbearers, “but his death has yet been the greatest blessing the country has ever received; now, reunion is perfect.”

  The catafalque was drawn by twenty-four black horses. Cleveland followed in a carriage pulled by six horses. Befitting the solemn occasion, Cleveland sat stone-faced, refusing to acknowledge the cheers that went up as he passed the teeming throngs.

  When he emerged from his carriage for the interment at Riverside Park, it was obvious that Cleveland was not well. The “killing hours” he had kept as governor and, now, as president had plainly taken a toll on him. He had put on even more weight, and he walked with a pronounced limp, favoring his right leg, which was affected by gout.

  But overwork alone was not to blame for Cleveland’s poor health. Gout is a form of rheumatism that is caused by high levels of uric acid in the blood. The acid crystallizes in joints, often in the feet, causing severe pain. In Grover’s day it was known as the rich man’s disease, because it could be brought on by excessive consumption of meat, fish, and alcohol (especially beer) and aggravated by obesity. In cartoons, sufferers were caricatured as rich, fat, and lazy, sitting with bandaged feet resting on stools. Grover was certainly not lazy, but his gluttonous proclivities and aversion to exercise were practically a recipe for gout, and the ailment would plague him for the rest of his life.

  But Cleveland found his bad habits impossible to break. When he’d moved into the White House, the new president had soon discovered he had no taste for the Gallic cuisine prepared by the White House chef, a Frenchman. “I must go to dinner,” he wrote a friend. “I wish it was to eat a pickled herring, Swiss cheese and a chop at Louis’ instead of the French stuff I shall find.” One night Cleveland caught a whiff of something familiar outside his window as he sat down to dinner. He summoned William Sinclair, the White House steward.

  “William, what is that smell?” the president asked.

  “I am very sorry, sir, but that is the smell of the servants’ dinner.”

  “What is it—corned beef and cabbage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, William, take this dinner down to the servants and bring their dinner to me.”

  Cleveland pronounced it the best meal he’d had in months.

  Cleveland eventually replaced the Frenchman with a woman named Eliza, who had been his cook at the governor’s mansion in Albany. From then on his usual breakfast consisted of oatmeal, beefsteak, eggs or a chop, and coffee. Not exactly a light, well-balanced meal.

  He also continued to smoke and drink. In the summer of 1885, Grover went hunting in the Adirondacks with some friends. Afterward, a hiker who passed the presidential party’s campsite was taken aback by the large number of empty bottles left behind—and only some of them were water bottles. Two years later, during a tour of the South, Grover arrived at the Atlanta home of Senator Alfred Colquitt after a grueling day of travel in pouring rain. “Senator,” said the dripping-wet president, “I must have a drink right away.” But Colquitt was a committed prohibitionist. “There hadn’t been a drop of liquor in the house since I lived in it,” he recalled. The flustered senator hurriedly fetched a bottle of bourbon from a neighbor, and the president had his drink—reportedly the only drink that Colquitt ever served in his life.

  As president, Cleveland wielded his veto pen as ruthlessly as he had as mayor and governor. In his first term he vetoed an astounding 414 bills, twice as many as all his predecessors combined. Many of the bills were private pension bills for Civil War veterans. One bill would have given drought-stricken Texas farmers $10,000 to purchase seed grain. “Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character,” he wrote in his veto message, “while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood.” He would veto another 170 bills in hi
s second term, for a total of 584 vetoes, second only to Franklin Roosevelt’s 635 (and FDR served more than three terms). Cleveland generally took a hands-off approach to the presidency. He believed his foremost responsibility was to prevent the enactment of bad laws.

  The highlight of his first term wasn’t political, however; it was personal. A month after taking office, Grover invited Oscar Folsom’s widow, Emma, and her daughter, Frances, to visit him in the White House. Several more visits from the Folsoms followed, and it was widely rumored that Grover and Emma were considering marriage. But the true object of Grover’s affection was Frances. “I don’t see why the papers keep marrying me to old ladies all the while,” the president quipped.

  Grover and Frances were an odd couple: He was burly and gruff. She was petite and charming. And, of course, there was the age difference—Grover was twenty-eight years older than Frances. He had practically been her guardian after her father was killed in a carriage accident. He had bought her a puppy when she was a little girl, and she’d called him Uncle Cleve. But as Frances matured, their feelings for each other blossomed into romance. When Frances went off to college at Wells, Grover sent her flowers regularly, and they corresponded faithfully. Grover was determined to hide their fledgling relationship from the papers, however. The lovebirds were never seen in public. When Frances visited the White House, she and Grover would spend evenings walking around the mansion and chatting. “Poor girl,” Grover would say to her years later, “you never had any courting like other girls.”

  Grover proposed to Frances by letter in August 1885, shortly before she and her mother embarked on a nine-month European vacation to celebrate Frances’s graduation from Wells. Frances accepted Grover’s proposal by return post. The wedding took place in the Blue Room of the White House on the evening of June 2, 1886, just six days after Frances returned from Europe. It was an intimate ceremony: just twenty-eight guests, including all the members of the cabinet and their wives, excepting Attorney General Augustus Garland, who, after the death of his wife several years earlier, had pledged to never again take part in “social festivities,” declining even to attend his own son’s wedding. The forty-nine-year-old groom donned a tuxedo with a white bowtie. The twenty-one-year-old bride wore a gown of heavy corded satin so stiff it could stand up by itself. Grover’s brother William, a Presbyterian minister, presided. In her vows, Frances promised to “love, honor, and . . . keep”—not “obey.” The music was provided by the Marine Band under the direction of John Philip Sousa.

  Grover Cleveland and Frances Folsom were married in the Blue Room of the White House on June 2, 1886. Cleveland is the only president to have been married in the mansion. He would not allow the ceremony to be photographed. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  Frances Cleveland became the youngest First Lady in history and one of the most beloved. William H. Crook, a longtime White House employee, remembered her arrival on the morning of the wedding. “She tripped up the steps, and swept through the great entrance like a radiant vision of young springtime . . . from that instant every man and woman of them all was a devoted slave, and remained such.” Pretty, witty, and unaffected, Frances proved to be an exceptional hostess, and she became Grover’s greatest political asset. One of his political enemies once declared, “I detest him so much that I don’t even think his wife is beautiful.”

  The Clevelands honeymooned at Deer Park, a resort in the mountains of western Maryland. They were followed by hordes of reporters, some of whom camped outside their simple rented cottage, peering through the windows and following the couple on their strolls through the woods. Their every move was described in detail for millions of delighted readers. Naturally, this circus did not improve Grover’s opinion of reporters in general.

  In fact, his relationship with the press only deteriorated as his presidency progressed. Of course, this was partly because reporters incessantly hounded him and Frances. But it was also a product of Grover’s personality. He was almost pathologically reserved, practically Nixonian in his social awkwardness. As a result, he was bewildered, frustrated, and outraged by the inordinate attention the papers paid to his personal life, and sometimes he was unable to contain his fury. In 1885 he fired off a letter to the publisher of the popular magazine Puck. “The falsehoods daily spread before the people in our newspapers,” he wrote, “are insults to the American love for decency and fair play of which we boast.” In a letter to the New York Evening Post, he condemned “keyhole correspondents.” “They have used the enormous power of the modern newspaper to perpetuate and disseminate a colossal impertinence, and have done it, not as professional gossips and tattlers, but as the guides and instructors of the public in conduct and morals.”

  Without the benefit of a bona fide press secretary, Cleveland was largely left to his own devices when it came to dealing with the press. On a vacation to the Adirondacks he considered selecting one reporter to accompany him and send reports to all the papers wishing to receive them—perhaps the earliest attempt at pool reporting. But, for the most part, he was helpless in the face of the braying papers. In 1886, Cleveland was giving a speech at Harvard when he noticed a group of reporters sitting at a table near the podium. “At once his voice and posture changed,” Harvard president Charles Eliot later recalled. “He uttered several denunciatory sentences on the conduct of the press towards himself as a man and towards the President of the United States; and . . . tears rolled down his cheeks . . . tears of wrath and indignation.”

  Cleveland’s fulmination, however, was selective. He was too shrewd to alienate indiscriminately. He realized he needed some allies in the newspaper business, and he counted a handful of prominent editors among his friends. But in general, he had no use for newspaper reporters. “Ghouls” he once called them. And when the time came, he would have no reservations about lying to them.

  In 1888, Cleveland ran for reelection. His opponent this time was Benjamin Harrison, a bearded and humorless Civil War general and former senator from Indiana. In stark contrast to the previous campaign, this one, in the words of one political reporter, was “conducted on both sides with . . . dignity and decency.”

  It was another nail-biter. Once again the election came down to New York, but this time Cleveland could not carry the state, losing by less than 1 percent of the vote. Despite losing the electoral vote, Cleveland still managed to win the popular vote (a scenario that would not be repeated until 2000). When Frances Cleveland moved out of the White House on March 4, 1889, she told a servant named Jerry Smith, “Now, Jerry, I want you to take care of all the furniture and ornaments in the house, for I want to find everything just as it is now when we come back again.”

  Smith gasped in disbelief.

  “We are coming back just four years from today,” Frances predicted.

  The Clevelands retreated to a handsome brownstone at 816 Madison Avenue in New York City. Grover practiced a bit of law, mostly acting as an arbitrator in business disputes. The couple didn’t go out much. They primarily socialized with a small but influential circle of friends, including actor Joseph Jefferson, banker Elias C. Benedict, and journalists L. Clarke Davis and Richard Watson Gilder. It was certainly a more highfalutin crowd than Grover had hung with when he was a bachelor in Buffalo. Now he was consorting with what one acquaintance described as “a millionaire’s crowd.” There would be no more German beer gardens with sawdust-covered floors. In New York, he was much closer to Wall Street, both literally and figuratively. He grew more sympathetic to the needs of bankers and business owners and less sensitive to the concerns of ordinary workers like his erstwhile friends in the saloons along Canal Street in Buffalo.

  A few minutes after midnight on October 3, 1891, Frances and Grover’s first child was born at the brownstone on Madison Avenue. Her name was Ruth, and her birth was front-page news. The papers dubbed her Baby Ruth and shamelessly reported her infantile exploits as news: “Baby Ruth . . . shook her chubby little hand to the crowd about the car window” (New York Tribune
, September 1, 1893). Ruth was as beloved as her mother. In 1890, the year before her birth, the name Ruth had been the forty-sixth most popular for girls born in the United States. In 1892, it was fifth.

  The Clevelands’ eldest child, it is worth noting here, has long been cited as the eponym for the Baby Ruth candy bar, but the evidence is unconvincing. Ruth would die of diphtheria in 1904. The candy bar debuted in 1921—just as the baseball slugger Babe Ruth was emerging as a national idol. By insisting that the bar was named for the dead daughter of a dead president, the Curtiss Candy Company successfully avoided compensating the home run king. Even Nestlé, the company that makes the bar today, acknowledges that “many theories surround the origin of the Baby Ruth name.”

  Buoyed by sweeping Democratic victories in the midterm elections of 1890, Cleveland began dabbling in national politics once again. The passage of the Silver Purchase Act in July 1890 had made the money question more urgent than ever, and in February 1891, Cleveland made his position on the contentious issue perfectly clear. In an open letter, he called “the unlimited coinage of silver” a “dangerous and reckless experiment.” By unequivocally aligning himself with the pro-gold, Eastern wing of the Democratic Party, Cleveland risked alienating pro-silver Democrats in the South and West. It was widely believed he had blown his chance to win the nomination in 1892, though he didn’t seem to mind. “At any rate,” he said, “no one can doubt where I stand.” And he decided to seek the nomination anyway.