The President Is a Sick Man

by Matthew Algeo

  Smith’s bitter antagonist was Alexander K. McClure, the quixotic publisher of the Times and Philadelphia’s answer to Joseph Pulitzer. Born on a farm in Perry County, Pennsylvania, in 1828, McClure had little formal schooling and went to work at fourteen as a tanner’s apprentice. In his teens he also began freelancing for the Perry Freemason, the local newspaper, and at nineteen he was appointed the paper’s editor. Three years later McClure headed a group of investors who bought a newspaper in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, called the Franklin Repository.

  Originally a Whig, McClure was an early convert to the Republican Party. In 1853, when he was just twenty-five, McClure was the party’s candidate for Pennsylvania auditor general, the youngest nominee for a statewide office in Pennsylvania at that time. He lost, but four years later he was elected to the state legislature, becoming one of the first Republicans seated in that body.

  At the Republican National Convention in 1860, McClure helped swing the Pennsylvania delegation to Lincoln, and as the party’s state chairman in Pennsylvania, he was instrumental in helping Lincoln carry that pivotal state. For this, Lincoln was deeply grateful, and it was said that McClure had a standing invitation to the White House when Lincoln was president.

  The Franklin Repository was a Republican newspaper, naturally, and during the Civil War it was one of the most prominent antislavery papers in Pennsylvania. McClure was merciless in his condemnation of the rebels, who exacted their revenge in 1864 when Confederate troops burned Chambersburg to the ground, specifically targeting McClure’s home.

  After the war McClure moved to Philadelphia, and in 1875 he founded the Times with a friend named Frank McLaughlin. Their initial investment was $50,000. Within ten years the paper was worth a million. McClure mimicked Pulitzer in many ways. The Times was heavy on sensationalism and illustrations, and the paper organized Pulitzer-like publicity stunts, such as raising $7,000 from readers to underwrite an “old time” Fourth of July celebration in 1887. But McClure was not merely an imitator. The Times was also one of the first newspapers to experiment with banner headlines, and the paper crusaded relentlessly against corruption in city government. McClure was sued for libel twenty times by the targets of his investigations. Not one of those cases was successful. McClure introduced Philadelphia to an aggressive brand of journalism that left his competitors—particularly the staid Press—scrambling to catch up.

  In the 1870s, McClure drifted away from the Republican Party. Appalled by the remorseless corruption of the Grant administration, he helped organize the Liberal Republicans, a breakaway faction that nominated New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley to run for president in 1872. (Greeley, of course, was trounced, and he died just twenty-four days after the election.) In 1880, McClure abandoned the Republicans altogether and supported Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock for president. Four years later, he endorsed Grover Cleveland.

  Just as he had helped Lincoln get elected in 1860, Alexander McClure helped Cleveland get elected in 1884. It was in McClure’s hotel room at the Democratic convention that Pennsylvania’s party bosses agreed to support Cleveland’s nomination—in exchange for control of patronage in the state.

  A month after the election, McClure went to Albany to meet Cleveland for the first time. He found him to be a “quiet, unassuming, straightforward, sternly honest and entirely frank man,” as well as a “delightful conversationalist.” McClure recommended himself to Cleveland chiefly by asking no favors. “I had no favorites to press upon him for any position,” McClure wrote, “and that probably brought me into closer personal connection with him during his later career than could have been obtained had I annoyed him with the claims of placemen.” The two men forged what McClure called “an intimate acquaintance,” and McClure frequently visited Cleveland when he was president. “I have many times gone to the White House by his appointment after ten o’clock at night,” McClure wrote, “and often passed the midnight hour with him.”

  McClure was one of the few newspapermen admitted to Cleveland’s inner circle, and he supported the president unconditionally. The Times, of course, played the same tune as its publisher, and even as the economy imploded in 1893, the paper steadfastly backed Cleveland. TheTimes was in denial about the panic, continually insisting things were getting better, or at least weren’t as bad as they seemed. Among the paper’s headlines that summer: “Hard Times Are Over.” “Things Have Been Exaggerated.” “Outlook Better Than Last Year.” “The Depression Is Over.” It was the journalism of wishful thinking.

  When E. J. Edwards published his explosive account of the secret operation performed on Cleveland, McClure leaped to his friend’s defense. McClure, who lived on a farm outside Philadelphia, liked to call himself a farmer, though his friends joked that his only crops were “sarcasm, irony, and invective.” All three would be harvested plentifully by McClure to attack his archrival the Press, as well as E. J. Edwards personally.

  It was not an era of good manners in journalism. Much like today’s cable news channels, newspapers competed ruthlessly for their audiences in a market that was hopelessly oversaturated. In the spring of 1870 there emerged what the newspaper historian Frank Luther Mott describes as an “epidemic of vituperation” among the New York dailies. “We observe that most of the newspapers in this city and Brooklyn have allowed themselves during the past week to attack each other in a highly personal manner,” read an editorial in the Tribune. “Why cannot Editors learn that the public wants of them nothing but the publication of news and temperate, dignified, gentlemanly explanation and criticism of current events?” Not that the Tribune was above the fray. Less than two weeks earlier the paper had said of the New York Times, “[It] lies deliberately, willfully, wickedly, and with naked intent to defame and malign.”

  Twenty-three years later, E. J. Edwards’s report triggered a similar epidemic in Philadelphia.

  On August 30, 1893, the day after Edwards’s story appeared in the Press, the Times began a systematic campaign to discredit it—and E. J. Edwards. Page one carried a report from Washington quoting Henry Thurber, one of the president’s secretaries. “I hear from Mr. Cleveland nearly every day,” Thurber said, “and in all of his letters he speaks of his improving health and strength. . . . Bills and other matters that require his signature are received by me almost daily, and the president’s name is signed in a hand that shows health and vigor.” Hardly irrefutable evidence of good health, but enough for the Times correspondent to pronounce the story of his “alleged” illness “discredited.” The Times’ lead editorial that day was entitled, “The Panic-Monger’s Degradation.” Almost certainly penned by McClure himself, the editorial scathingly, sarcastically attacks Edwards and his report:

  In conscienceless sensationalism we recall nothing more infamous than a long dispatch printed yesterday by the Press under the date of New York with the displayed heading, “The President a Very Sick Man.” It professes to reveal, with great regret and under a stern sense of duty, some awful facts about the president that his friends have concealed. . . . [Edwards] builds up three columns of pretentious and portentous verbiage and sneaking insinuation. He hopes that it is not cancer. True, there is no reason to suppose that it is, but then General Grant died of cancer. And Mr. Cleveland is so noble, so heroic, so beloved; it would be a calamity for the country to lose him; and all this in a tone of fulsome insincerity that is all the viler because so plausible. . . .

  But we can have no quarrel with a person of this sort. It is not the writing of his sensations that we object to, but the printing of them, and for that the responsibility belongs to the paper that for weeks and months has been laboring by every device of exaggeration, misrepresentation, or suppression, by distorting news or by making it, to excite a panic among its readers. . . . The best that can be said of this latest sensation is that it seems to mark the lowest depth to which it is possible even for the Press to sink.

  McClure did not let up. The front page of the next day’s Times carried a rare banner hea
dline: “The President Is All Right, The Country Is All Right, Business Will Be All Right.” Underneath it—and a subhead reading “The Calamity-Howler’s Lies”—the Times published a story that begins, “The only element of truth in the latest story of President Cleveland’s illness which has been printed in Philadelphia is that he suffered from toothache and that the teeth which pained him were removed on board E. C. Benedict’s yacht.”

  “A Mr. Edwards, of the Philadelphia Press,” the story continues, “discovered that the president had been in a dentist’s chair and he surrounded his report of that event with all the cruel and cold-blooded details, true and false, which his imagination could call up.”

  The story repeats the administration’s lie that the president had merely had some dental work performed upon him on the yacht:

  During the evening of the first day out Dr. Hasbrouck removed two teeth from Mr. Cleveland’s jaw. Dr. Keen assisted him in one of the commonest, simplest operations known to dentistry when he cut away a part of the antrum of the jaw which had been diseased along with the teeth. There was no question of cancer or of sarcoma, and the cutting away of the diseased tissue was an operation which dentists find necessary in nine out of every ten cases of this kind which come before them. The comparison between Mr. Cleveland’s toothache and the serious malady from which General Grant suffered and which caused his death was only another evidence of the exquisite heartlessness of the newspaper correspondent. . . .

  If anything further is needed to refute this and future stories of Mr. Cleveland’s health it is an exact understanding of their source. . . . When Mr. Cleveland made his trip on the Oneida to Buzzards Bay, Mr. Edwards recorded the journey pleasantly, and his account of it written at the time is today the best evidence of the deliberate falsity of his second report.

  A Times editorial entitled “A Disgrace to journalism” once again excoriates Edwards. The correspondent “twists and obscures” the facts to “bolster up the original lie.” “This sort of misreporting is the very depth of despicable journalism.” McClure was unrelenting. The next day, September 1, the Times published a cartoon on the front page that depicts the GOP as an organ grinder and Edwards as the organ grinder’s monkey. Under the headline “The Calamity Liar,” it also published an interview Ferdinand Hasbrouck gave the New York Tribune, emphasizing minor inconsistencies that supposedly proved Edwards had “faked” his original interview with the dentist. The paper also reprinted L. Clarke Davis’s “toothache” letter claiming the president was “in excellent health.” In the following days the Times labeled Edwards a “calamity howler” and a “famous falsifier” and accused him of committing “crimes against public tranquility.”

  This editorial cartoon appeared on the front page of the Philadelphia Times on September 1, 1893. It was part of Times publisher Alexander McClure’s campaign to discredit E. J. Edwards and his story about the secret operation on the president.

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  Other papers also questioned the veracity of Edwards’s report. The Philadelphia Inquirer dismissed it as “not a new story.” But none attacked with the venom of the Times. As Edwards himself wrote many years later, “I was very grossly abused, especially by the Phila. Times.”

  Times publisher Alexander McClure seems to have taken this particular battle quite personally. At the very least he was unsportsmanlike. Partly this was due to his friendship with Cleveland, but it was also because he simply loathed the Press and its editor, Charles Emory Smith. The Press epitomized much that McClure despised about the newspaper business. It was stuffy and pompous, and its editor, in McClure’s opinion, was an unctuous jerk with an unwarranted overabundance of self-esteem.

  Likewise, McClure could not abide the college-educated reporters then in their ascendency in the newspaper business—reporters like E. J. Edwards, a Yale grad twice over. After all, McClure himself had left school by the time he was fourteen. As far as he was concerned, college was a waste of time for journalists. In an 1877 editorial he advised young men considering a career in newspapers that “journalism is the most exacting of all professions, and the sooner young men dismiss the idea that a college diploma qualifies them to take an editorial or reporter’s chair the sooner they will protect themselves against every disappointment.” McClure resented the growing influence of college men in the newspaper business, and he took it out on E. J. Edwards.

  The Times’ mistreatment of Edwards must have appalled Dr. William Williams Keen, the good Baptist. Undoubtedly the vitriol offended his sense of Christian charity, but he felt powerless to intervene. Torn between his vow of secrecy and a desire to vindicate Edwards, Keen chose to honor the former at the cost of the reporter’s reputation. Keen would never quite forgive himself for failing to speak out in the journalist’s defense.

  At first Edwards’s paper dismissed the Times attacks as unworthy of a response. “As for the Philadelphia Times,” a Press editorial from August 31 says, “we have only to say that it has ceased to be a newspaper and become chiefly a stock jobbing concern, and its treatment of this subject is beneath contempt.” (The term “stockjobber” referred to an unscrupulous stockbroker.) But the following day, the Press promised to start fighting back. “The Times has chosen, spitefully, pettishly, indecently, with the single interest of a stockjobber and the venom of a rattlesnake, to strike at the Press. We never open that kind of a fight, but we never shrink from it.” The editorial called the Times “stupid,” “malignant,” and “asinine.”

  The next day the Times responded with a warning. “The Press should keep its temper,” the paper said. “Impetuous bombast won’t hide or excuse the terrible blunder that journal has committed in its calamity falsehood about the fatal illness of the President.”

  The Press fired back:

  We beg the pardon of our readers for a method of treatment in this case which is not according to our usual standard and taste. But there is a kind of animal with which it is difficult to hold honorable controversy. There are only two ways of dealing with it. The first is to leave its own field to itself, and keep out of reach of the filth. The other is to accept the risk of unpleasant contact and do a little straight, downright clubbing for the common weal. There are times when the latter alternative, however unwelcome, is a real public service. . . .

  The opinion or attitude of the Times as to the Press publication concerning the President was not in itself of the slightest consequence. . . . But however impotent the rage, however pitiful the jealousy and however inconsequential the harmfulness of the Times, the Press is not in the habit of letting such vicious attacks, come from what source they may, go unrebuked. . . .

  There was no reasonable warrant or justification for any criticism upon the Press in connection with Holland’s publication. . . . There is not a real metropolitan newspaper of enterprise in New York or Boston or Chicago that would not gladly have paid at least $1000 for its exclusive possession and publication, and every journalist knows it. Through the confidence which Holland has carefully built up by his long and honorable work, it happened to fall into the possession of the metropolitan newspaper of Philadelphia, and its careful publication in the most conservative manner was not only an illustration of the best journalism, but it was a distinct public service because it cleared away a cloud of rumors and mysteries and perplexities, and presented the truth which it is always best to meet and to face. . . .

  Enough said. Au revoir.

  Two days later, on Tuesday, September 5, the Times published another editorial cartoon on page one. This one depicts McClure as a doctor amputating Edwards’s right foot and left arm, which are wrapped in bandages marked “Presidential Cancer” and “Panic.”

  The caption: “Au Revoir!”

  The battle between the Press and the Times became a story in its own right, with other papers taking sides. “The Boss Flunker is the Philadelphia Times,” said the Harrisburg Telegraph. “McClure made a great play at Charles Emory Smith of the Press and blackguarded him
like a pickpocket because the Press printed the news about Cleveland’s illness.” Some thought the spat was just plain silly. The Philadelphia Inquirer quipped, “The President’s health yesterday was just robust enough to give the robust liars on both sides another chance to have him slowly dying and stronger than the strongest man.”

  More significantly, E. J. Edwards’s report and the subsequent dispute between the Press and the Times touched off an unprecedented national debate over the public’s right to know about the health of the president. Until then, no one had paid much heed to a president’s wellness (unless he’d been shot). Notoriously sickly chief executives like Andrew Jackson had taken virtually no steps to hide their conditions from the public—Old Hickory had an old bullet wound in his chest that was continually infected and was said to give off a most unappealing odor. But Edwards’s report spurred many newspapers to demand President Cleveland come clean about his health. “The people had a right to this information,” said New Jersey’s Trenton Gazette. “President Cleveland belongs to them more than he belongs to himself or his few close friends.” Of course, papers sympathetic to the president disagreed. “Grover Cleveland has as much right to privacy as any or every other American citizen,” said the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “The President has the right of every other citizen to the protection of his confidences with his physicians, his friends and his family from lugubrious publication.”

  One thing many papers could agree on was that the president should have been more forthcoming from the start. “If the facts had been frankly and fully stated at the beginning,” the Troy Times of New York editorialized, “there would have been no occasion for the public uneasiness regarding the President’s condition.”

  Given the conflicting accounts of the president’s health, the public was largely inclined to believe that E. J. Edwards had, at the very least, exaggerated the severity of the president’s condition. Some even believed he’d made the whole thing up, just as Alexander McClure kept insisting. The Cleveland administration’s strategy—constant denials and staged displays of the president’s fitness—paid off. Most Americans were probably already inclined to believe the Honest President anyway. Ironically, Cleveland’s reputation for integrity actually made it easier for him to pull off one of the great deceptions in American political history.