The President Is a Sick Man

by Matthew Algeo

  The answer, it turned out, was in a small glass jar.

  Despite the harsh treatment he received at the hands of Grover’s minions, E. J. Edwards did not hold it against the president. In November 1893, just months after reporting what really happened on the Oneida, Edwards published a long and flattering profile of Grover in McClure’s Magazine. Ironically, Edwards described the essence of Grover’s character as “the courage of truth” and his only political fault as “honesty.”

  Edwards continued cranking out twenty-five-hundred-word columns for the Press six days a week, and in 1894 he scored another brilliant beat, one for which he would once again be vilified—and, this time, nearly thrown in jail. The affair became known as the Sugar Trust scandal.

  At the time, the U.S. sugar industry was controlled by a single entity formally known as the American Sugar Refining Company, but better known simply as the Sugar Trust. Styled along the lines of the other great trusts, including Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, the Sugar Trust was a coalition of twenty-four sugar refiners that had banded together in 1887 in hopes of “lessening the expenses of production, culling . . . useless employees, and preventing overproduction.” It was, in other words, a monopoly. By 1893 the Sugar Trust controlled the industry from the cane fields to the coffee cup. As the world’s largest buyer of raw sugarcane, it dictated prices. Planters had to either accept the trust’s offer or “eat their sugar.” Retail prices were likewise fixed. It was estimated the Sugar Trust raked in as much as $35 million in profit annually. “Other trusts there are as illegal and as wicked in intention,” the New York World wrote, “but none so successfully rapacious, so completely in control of a product necessary to civilized men in all stations, or so merciless in abusing that control.”

  As the owner of the largest refinery in the trust, Henry O. Have-meyer had more or less total control of the enterprise. Havemeyer was the epitome of the nineteenth-century robber baron. While the country was sinking into depression in 1893, he was said to be “earning” $2 million a month. He and his second wife were prolific and relatively tasteful art collectors. Hundreds of their pieces would eventually be donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including works by Degas, Monet, and Rembrandt. (Evidently, however, Henry’s business savvy failed him in the art world. Twelve of his fifteen Renoirs turned out to be forgeries.)

  The robber barons were a loathsome bunch, but few were loathed as passionately as Henry Havemeyer. In the treatment of his workers he made George Pullman look like Dorothea Dix. In the summer of 1892, twenty-four firemen who stoked the massive boilers in Havemeyer’s refinery died from injuries and illnesses caused by the scalding heat in the boiler room. The following June, the firemen went on strike. Their only demand was that the length of the workday be decreased from twelve hours to eight hours during the summer. Havemeyer refused, and replaced the striking workers.

  Clearly Henry Havemeyer was not a man to be trifled with, but E. J. Edwards did just that—and managed to antagonize the U.S. Senate in the process.

  In his Holland letter in the Press on May 14, 1894, Edwards reported that Havemeyer had met with Grover in the summer of 1892 to discuss the “interests” of the Sugar Trust. According to Edwards, the trust “contributed the magnificent sum of $500,000” to the Democratic campaign that fall, with the understanding that the party would not endorse legislation “antagonistic” to the trust. At the time, a half-cent tariff was imposed on every pound of refined sugar imported into the United States. But this was not a “revenue” tariff that raised money for the government. It was a “differential” tariff that was paid directly to the Sugar Trust. It was, in other words, a government handout that amounted to roughly $20 million a year. Naturally, Havemeyer was eager to keep this spigot open. As he liked to say, “The tariff is the mother of trusts.”

  In the fall of 1893, however, a bill that would have entirely eliminated the sugar tariff was passed by the House and referred to the Senate Finance Committee. The following February the Democratic members of that committee were meeting informally when, quite unexpectedly, Treasury Secretary John Carlisle entered the room. “He went secretly and came away secretly,” Edwards wrote.

  His visit was supposed to be a confidential one. . . . They looked upon him as speaking, not so much for Mr. Carlisle, as for the administration. He did not say that he came from the President, but when he had finished making his astonishing statement, not one of those who heard him doubted that he had come from the President and was echoing the President’s wishes, and giving emphasis to them by an earnest, and for him, excited manner. What he said is quoted from remembrance, but it is substantially accurate, as it was reported by one who heard it. He said:

  “Gentlemen, there is one thing that I am bound to say to you as earnestly and impressively as I can do it, and I speak to you as a Democrat to Democrats. No party or the representatives of no party can afford to ignore honorable obligations. I want to say to you that there seems to be danger that this is going to be done. Gentlemen associated with the sugar refining interests (I may tell you perhaps what you do not know) subscribed to the campaign several hundred thousand dollars and at a time when money was urgently needed. I tell you that it would be wrong, it would be infamous, after having accepted that important contribution, given at a time when it was imperatively needed, for the Democratic party now to turn around and strike down the men who gave it. It must not be done. I trust that you will prepare an amendment to the bill which will be reasonable and in some measure satisfactory to these interests.”

  That, in substance, was the plea of Secretary Carlisle to the members of the Finance Committee that they respect the obligations entered into by the national campaign committee and the personal representatives of Mr. Cleveland in 1892.

  The final version of the bill included a tariff that would result in an annual windfall of $15 million for the Sugar Trust—$5 million less than it had received under the old tariff, but, apparently, enough to satisfy Havemeyer. Cleveland, who professed to be opposed to tariffs, allowed the bill to become law without his signature.

  Edwards also reported that at least two senators had purchased large amounts of Sugar Trust stock after the Finance Committee had decided to restore the tariff but before its decision was made public. One of the senators, Edwards estimated, had made $500,000 “by reason of his good fortune in procuring inside knowledge.”

  Edwards’s accusations were explosive. Indignant senators, their honor offended, demanded an investigation. On May 17, 1894, just three days after the story was published, the Senate passed a resolution creating a special committee to look into Edwards’s allegations. A few days after that, Edwards received a telegram: “You are requested to appear before the committee. Do you accept this as a legal summons? Answer.”

  Edwards appeared before the committee on May 24. It quickly became apparent that the panel was less interested in ascertaining the veracity of his account than in finding out who squealed. During the proceedings, the committee’s chairman, Delaware senator George Gray asked Edwards point-blank: “Who was your informant?” Edwards responded,

  That, I suppose, I shall have to decline to answer. I do it with the utmost respect to the committee and the Senate. The information was given to me under obligations of the highest confidentiality by the one who entailed that obligation, so that I do not feel at liberty to reveal his name.

  That would not do. Nebraska senator William Allen picked up the cudgel for the committee.

  Senator Allen: Was the man a member of Congress?

  Mr. Edwards: I suppose that is in the nature of cross-examination tending to get me to disclose. But I will say that he is not a member of Congress.

  Senator Allen: Was he a clerk in the employ of the Government?

  Mr. Edwards: I ought to draw the line at that question, and I decline to answer it. I do it with respect.

  Senator Allen: You understand, you have no right to secrete the name of any such person when you are called upon in an examinati
on of this kind. We have a right to demand the name of you. The only shield you have here is you are at liberty not to testify on any subject that would subject you to a criminal prosecution. If the statement does not criminate you under the law, you can not conceal that name. Do you understand that to be the case?

  Mr. Edwards: I do not.

  Senator Allen: That is true. Under those circumstances, do you still refuse to disclose the man’s name?

  Mr. Edwards: I think I should like to get the opinion of counsel about that. My sense of honor in regard to that gentleman is so delicate; I want to do what is right; I want to meet my obligation with perfect freedom.

  The committee adjourned to allow Edwards to fetch his lawyer. When testimony resumed, Edwards still refused to identify his source. His lawyer, Abram Dittenhoefer, argued that the senators were seeking information that was “utterly unnecessary.”

  It is unimportant for the committee, for the purpose of arriving at the truth of the alleged charge, to ascertain who informed Mr. Edwards. The question before the committee is whether the charge is true or false, not who gave the information. . . .

  Lastly, being a newspaper man, the witness is under honorable obligations not to disclose the source of his information, because if he violated that obligation of honor it would degrade him in the estimation, not only of members of his own profession, but of the entire community.

  The committee was not moved by Dittenhoefer’s argument. “The objections made by the witness under the instructions of his counsel were overruled,” the transcript of the hearing curtly notes, “and the witness was directed to answer.” Still, Edwards refused, and on May 29 the Senate passed a resolution charging him with contempt and ordering his arrest. It was a serious charge. If convicted, Edwards could be jailed. And the threat was real. In 1871 the Senate had jailed two New York Tribune reporters who refused to identify a source.

  After Edwards testified, the special committee summoned the Democratic members of the Finance Committee to appear. To a man, the senators denied what Edwards had reported, and for the second time in less than a year his name was dragged through the mud.

  George Vest of Missouri: “Nothing of that kind occurred in our committee.”

  Daniel Voorhees of Indiana: “There is not a single word of truth in the article—not a word.”

  Roger Mills of Texas: “I know nothing on earth about it.”

  And so on. Treasury Secretary Carlisle also testified that Edwards’s report was “absolutely false.”

  His old nemesis, Philadelphia Times publisher Alexander McClure, was only too happy to pile on. “He published columns of compiled gossip and scandal about Senators and other government officials, and the Sugar Trust,” the Times said of Edwards in an editorial,

  [B]ut he skulks behind innuendoes and indefinite generalities as to individuals, and when called upon to allow the Senate to vindicate itself by naming its accusers, so that they could be brought face to face, he seals his lips and calls his scandals privileged communications made to him in confidence.

  This is simply a burlesque on journalistic dignity and decency, and it is the duty of Mr. Edwards either to give the Senate information to enable it to probe the truth of the gossip, or to confess that his publication was a sensational and unjustifiable scandal.

  On August 2, the special committee issued its findings. Citing no more evidence than the testimony of the senators under suspicion, the report exonerated them and concluded that Edwards’s allegations were “without foundation in fact and utterly untrue.” The report went on to say, “The conduct of Mr. Edwards in making and publishing so specific and serious a charge against public men, and one affecting their discharge of high public duties, upon no personal knowledge, and upon no information, the source of which he is willing to disclose, calls for serious reprobation.”

  Edwards was allowed to remain free until he had his day in court, which came on Friday, June 18, 1897, more than three years after he had published the Sugar Trust story.

  It was not a long day. After listening to testimony from just three witnesses, including the special committee’s chairman, George Gray, a District of Columbia judge ruled that the telegram the committee had sent to Edwards was not a legal summons. Therefore, Edwards could not be held in contempt. Besides, the judge added, the questions Edwards had refused to answer “were not pertinent to the inquiry.” The judge ordered the jury to render a verdict of not guilty, which was done.

  Although Edwards had been acquitted on a technicality, the court was clearly sympathetic to the argument that he should not be forced to identify his source. In some ways it was a landmark case. Edwards’s lawyer, Abram Dittenhoefer, considered the verdict “a great victory for the newspaper profession.” In an editorial, Edwards’s paper agreed. It was only a matter of time, the Press wrote, before the law would fully recognize “the privilege of journalism in protecting confidential sources of information.”

  The principle is just in reason and in practice. It is vital to liberty and it does not conduce to license. It is inherent in the very conditions of modern journalism. It is just as essential in the operation of modern social and public forces as any power of Congress itself, and the time will come when it will be declared from the bench as it will be recognized in legislative halls.

  That time, alas, has not yet come. Reporters can still be jailed for protecting their sources. In 2005, Judith Miller of the New York Times spent eighty-five days behind bars for refusing to tell a grand jury how she learned the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

  Edwards’s account of the Sugar Trust scandal was corroborated by another reporter at the time. John Shriver of the New York Mail and Express said he learned of the secret meeting between Treasury Secretary Carlisle and the Democratic members of the Finance Committee from a member of Congress whom he refused to identify.

  Like Edwards, Shriver was charged with contempt for refusing to cooperate with the special committee investigating the scandal. Three other people, including Henry Havemeyer, were also charged. All but one were acquitted. Elverton Chapman, a New York stockbroker who refused to identify his clients, was found guilty and served thirty days in a Washington jail.

  In 1900 the Sugar Trust renamed itself after one of its most popular brands and became Domino Sugar. Seven years later, Henry Havemeyer died of heart failure. He was sixty. He left an estate valued at anywhere from $10 million to $40 million ($200 million to $800 million today). The sole beneficiaries were his wife and three children.

  E. J. Edwards’s career would continue well into the third decade of the twentieth century, but he would always remain a man of the nineteenth. He never abandoned his thick walrus moustache, even after it had long passed out of fashion. He adopted the typewriter only grudgingly and only at the insistence of his considerably younger editors, who were frustrated when his penmanship deteriorated due to cataracts. Later he would dictate his columns to a stenographer.

  Edwards continued writing his Holland letters for the Philadelphia Press until 1909, when he moved to the Wall Street Journal. He was sixty-two at the time, and his new position was less demanding: He was asked to write only three or four columns a week, half his usual output at the Press. He also wrote a syndicated column of reminiscences called “New News of Yesterday.”

  It was a fine career—but one seemingly tainted forever by allegations that he had faked the story about the secret operation on Grover Cleveland.

  11

  THE TRUTH (AT LAST)

  IN THE MONTHS FOLLOWING the operation on the Oneida, William Williams Keen went to Washington several times to examine Grover’s mouth. “In these visits,” Keen recalled, “I usually lunched with the family and saw Mrs. Cleveland and the children, who were charming young girls.” Twelve years later, in 1905, Keen twice saw Grover in consultation with Dr. Bryant at Westland, the Cleveland home in Princeton. The former president complained of severe abdominal pain. “Owing to his excessively fat belly walls,” Keen wrote, “it was
impossible to examine the abdominal viscera with accuracy.” Like Dr. Erdmann, Keen suspected the cause was a “malignant growth,” but he and Bryant agreed that an operation would be “injudicious” in light of the patient’s age and condition.

  After Cleveland died, Keen would occasionally run into Frances Cleveland at the office of an eye doctor they both saw. On one occasion, in 1912, Frances was with one of her daughters. Frances said it was an odd coincidence, for only the night before she had told her daughters of the secret operation on their father for the first time.

  In 1901, when he was sixty-four, Keen embarked on a two-year trip around the world with two of his daughters. From Philadelphia they headed west to San Francisco, then on to Alaska, Russia, Japan, the Philippines, China, Burma, India, Iran, Turkey, Greece, and Italy. In Manila they had lunch with William Howard Taft, the governor-general of the Philippines. In Burma, Keen broke his clavicle when he was thrown from a horse. In Iran he rather improbably bumped into one of his former students, an Iranian-American named Joseph Shimoon.

  As the years passed, laurels were heaped upon Keen. He collected honorary degrees from Northwestern, Edinburgh, and Yale. The Royal College of Surgeons and the American College of Surgeons both made him an honorary fellow. He followed avidly and with awe the seemingly relentless advance of medicine: the discovery of X-rays (1895), a typhoid fever vaccine (1896), the first successful human blood transfusion (1907).

  He crossed paths with more presidents, too. When William McKinley was a congressman, Keen performed a minor operation on McKinley’s wife, Ida. After McKinley became president, Keen was invited to lunch with the McKinleys at the White House several times. On one occasion, Ida, who was epileptic, had a seizure during the meal. “She trembled rather violently and convulsively all over,” Keen remembered. “In an instant, the president rose, threw his napkin over her head and face, and drew her body and head to his breast.” The attack subsided after two or three minutes, which, Keen noted, “seemed an hour.” Afterward, lunch resumed as if nothing had happened.