Lamont was unsure. “I don’t know . . . ”
Five days later, the Kentuckian was in Albany. Lamont told him to wait outside the office and went in to tell Governor Cleveland that the Kentucky tailor was there.
“Bring him to me,” Cleveland said.
Lamont returned with him, and Cleveland stiffly invited him to take a seat. “Are your proofs all here?”
“Yes, sir, all of them.” They were certified copies of public records, plus letters from three witnesses. Taken in total, he said, they told the sordid story behind Blaine’s marriage to his wife of thirty-three years.
Cleveland asked, “Everything is here then, and you are holding nothing in reserve?” When Cleveland was assured that everything was now in his custody, the governor turned to Lamont. “Arrange with this man a proper sum for his expenses, the time he has lost and his good will in the matter, and pay him.”
A brief negotiation followed, after which Lamont wrote out a check, and the fellow was on his way home.
When Lamont went back to find Cleveland, he saw that the papers were laid out on the governor’s desk—Cleveland started to rip them apart. Lamont watched dumbfounded, too shocked to say a word. Then Cleveland called for a porter and ordered him to throw the scraps of paper into the fireplace and set them ablaze. He stood before the fire and watched the documents disintegrate into black soot. Then he turned to his aide.
“The other side can have a monopoly of all the dirt in this campaign,” he said.
Nevertheless, the grubby story found its way into print on August 8, in the pages of the Indianapolis Sentinel, a rabble-rousing Democratic newspaper in Indiana. Cleveland told Lamont he was “very sorry it was printed.”
“I hope it will die out at once,” he said.
The backstory was this: In 1850, Blaine was just out of college and teaching at a military academy in Kentucky when he met another teacher, Harriet Stanwood, who came from a wealthy Maine family. They fell in love and, six months later, became engaged. Not long thereafter, word reached Blaine that his father had died in Pennsylvania. He made the arrangements to attend the funeral and settle his father’s estate, not knowing when or if he would ever return to Kentucky. And so on June 30, 1850, in the presence of a few trusted friends, Blaine wed Harriet Stanwood in a quickie ceremony conducted by an itinerant preacher. Alas, the preacher failed to procure a proper marriage license—technically, the Blaines were not legally married. Nine months later, when Harriet was pregnant with her first child, she and Blaine decided to take their vows in church, this time in the presence of family members. The date was March 25, 1851. Their son Stanwood Blaine was born eleven weeks later.
Out of this romance, the Sentinel, under hard-line publisher and editor John C. Shoemaker, spun a lurid story, accusing Blaine of having “despoiled” Harriet Stanwood and only marrying her “at the muzzle of a shotgun.” A layer of conspiracy was introduced when the Sentinel reported that somebody had crept into a cemetery in Augusta, Maine, and chiseled out the date of Stanwood Blaine’s birth to make it illegible. (He died on July 31, 1854, at the age of three.) The desecration of the stone lent credence to the fable that the boy’s conception had been illegitimate. James Blaine was understandably beside himself with this ghoulish violation of his son’s resting place.
“As a candidate for the presidency, I knew that I should encounter many forms of calumny and personal defamation, but I confess that I did not expect to be called upon to defend the name of a beloved and honored wife, who is a mother and a grandmother, nor did I expect that the grave of my little child would be cruelly desecrated.”
Even after Blaine filed a libel suit against the Sentinel, Shoemaker kept up the attacks. He distributed an eight-page supplement that detailed the history of the Blaine marriage; he also published a slimy attack on Blaine’s practice of warmly embracing supporters at campaign stops. Blaine, said Shoemaker, was guilty of “man-kissing.”
Now, if ladies were voters, and it were ladies he practiced his osculatory art upon, we should not object—i.e., if the ladies did not. But this thing of his kissing men—of pressing his bearded lips upon bearded lips—is too aggressive. Last week, over in Ohio, Mr. Blaine kissed a man who boarded his train. No longer than last night he kissed two men in this city.
Not for nothing is the presidential election of 1884 called the dirtiest in American history.
On board the morning riverboat that pulled into Albany harbor were the most eminent leaders of the Democratic Party from all thirty-eight states and the Territory of Washington. They were there to officially notify Grover Cleveland that he had been nominated the party’s candidate for the presidency. At three in the afternoon, in a drizzling rain, the men, in squads of four, climbed aboard twenty-five carriages and, with the Tenth Regiment band at the head of the procession, made their way through the capital’s streets to the governor’s mansion on Eagle Street. There they where shown into the drawing room and formed themselves into a semicircle to await Cleveland’s appearance. On the other side of the room, enjoying this day of high honor, were Cleveland’s top aides, and the women of his household: Cleveland’s sisters, Mary Hoyt and Rose Cleveland; his two nieces from Ceylon, Mary and Carrie Hastings; and Emma Folsom and her daughter Frances. Daniel Manning was also there, and Wilson Bissell and Dan Lamont. Other than an immense bank of roses, carnations, and geraniums that had been grown in the governor’s greenhouse, the room was empty of all furniture or ornamentation.
Cleveland descended the staircase and strode into the room to generous applause. For the occasion, he wore a new suit of black broadcloth, with a high collar and black tie. The formal certificate of notification was presented to him in a handsomely embossed portfolio bound in Russian leather. Cleveland thanked everyone and pledged to campaign on a platform of simple truths. It marked the official launch of the fall campaign season. Prolonged applause followed, and the crowd of dignitaries surged forward to shake hands with the candidate.
Frances Folsom was the prettiest young lady in the room, but none of the unmarried men on the governor’s staff who attended the ceremony dared approach her. Bissell was quite amused.
“If one of you, young fellows, doesn’t take an interest in Ms. Folsom, the governor is likely to walk off with her himself!” Everyone laughed.
Eleven days later, around the time that Maria Halpin disappeared from her home in New Rochelle, Cleveland started out for the north woods of New York State. In this time of crisis, he was going on a two-week vacation. Accompanying him was Dr. Samuel B. Ward, an Albany physician. On August 9, Cleveland and his party took a buckboard carriage to the Prospect House hotel, a popular resort in Upper Saranac Lake. They arrived to the hearty cheers of the hundred and fifty guests who had assembled on the veranda. That evening, Cleveland had dinner at the home of a local dignitary, Paul Smith, where yet another committee of prominent citizens welcomed him with speeches and fanfare. It was all too much for Cleveland.
“I hope that brass bands and such nonsense are over for a time,” he grumbled.
That night, he finally had a chance to unpack and found that Lamont, with his usual attention to detail, had stuffed the trunk with an enormous quantity of stationery. It made Cleveland chortle. “I imagine you must have thought I intended to establish the Executive Chamber here,” he wrote Lamont. Once again his private secretary was proving himself to be indispensable. Cleveland informed him that he was so exhausted, he was thinking about extending his vacation into a third week.
The next night, Cleveland stayed up until 2:00 a.m. working on a formal letter of acceptance. He got up that same morning at six thirty and went over the letter, not quite knowing whether he liked the final product or not, but it was just about done, such as it was. He got to thinking about the duplicity of Benjamin Butler and John Kelly, which still rankled, and he had to wonder whether the members of his own party were behind the Maria Halpin scandal.
“Now this is for you privately,” he wrote Lamont. “I want to tell
you just how I feel. I had rather be beaten in this race than truckle to Butler or Kelly.” Cleveland said he was determined to show a “stiff upper lip” and not violate his principles in his dealings with these two troublemakers.
He missed his friends. “Remember me to Apgar,” he told Lamont. “Give my affectionate regards to Manning.”
Cleveland and Dr. Ward spent the next two weeks hunting and “a-fishing” in the Adirondacks and dealing with the August heat and discomfort. They were steadily on the move from sunrise to sunset, with Ward boasting that they “very frequently had no better couch to sleep on than the damp ground.” When Cleveland finally returned to Albany, sunburned and rested, he flat out refused to hit the campaign trail. Pressing the flesh was not Cleveland’s way—he found it beneath his dignity. In addition, staying home could be a good strategy: Samuel Tilden had remained aloof from the campaign trail when he ran in 1876 and, in doing so, cemented his reputation as a great politician who stood above the fray. And when Garfield ran for office in 1880, he had not strayed far from his own backyard. Cleveland’s Republican opponent, James Blaine, was a different kind of political animal. He was already slugging it out in the West, having set forth on a grueling six-week road trip. When it was over, somebody counted the number of campaign stops Blaine made—four hundred in all.
Standing in for Cleveland was a proxy of Democratic Party big shots, none more valued than the vice-presidential candidate Thomas Hendricks. Once his displeasure at being denied the top slot on the ticket was behind him, the sixty-year-old Hendricks directed most of his energy on his stronghold, his home state of Indiana, which he had to deliver. Illinois, next door, was also in play. Interest in the general election was intense everywhere in the Midwest. At a barbecue in tiny Shelbyville, Indiana, thirty thousand citizens showed up to hear Hendricks speak.
Hendricks, along with two nieces, was traveling in a private car owned by the superintendent of the Bloomington and Western Railroad to Bloomington, Illinois, for a campaign stop when the train ran into trouble. Going thirty-five miles an hour, it suddenly jumped off the tracks just outside Farmer City. The car skidded down an embankment before coming to a stop, bottom up. Amid the shrieks of the other passengers, Hendricks and his nieces managed to extricate themselves from the wreckage. Luck was with them. Twenty passengers were hurt, eight of them seriously, but Hendricks was only slightly bruised. He emerged shaken, with an injury that was described as “trifling”—and his nieces escaped unscathed. Hendricks proved himself so indefatigable a campaigner that he continued on to Bloomington and arrived in time to make his campaign appearance.
In Buffalo, George Ball remained utterly convinced of Grover Cleveland’s unfitness to serve as president. The preacher launched a new line of attack, piling on the allegations against the Democratic candidate and including some shocking new charges.
“For many years, days devoted to business have been followed by nights of sin,” Ball wrote of the governor. “He has lived as a bachelor . . . lodged in rooms on the third floor in a business block, and made those rooms a harem.” Cleveland, claimed Ball, was a “champion libertine, an artful seducer, a foe to virtue, an enemy of the family, a snare to youth, and hostile to true womanhood. The Halpin case was not solitary. Women now married and anxious to cover the signs of their youth have been his victims. Since he has become governor of this great state, he has not abated his lecheries.”
According to Ball, a German woman who lived down by the railroad tracks, and her two daughters, were eager to quench Cleveland’s lust. Ball claimed that Cleveland’s lascivious behavior had persisted even after his election as governor. When Cleveland visited Buffalo, he was seen at a saloon with three other men. All were intoxicated when they went to an apartment in another part of town and “sent out for four lewd women and spent the night and all day Sunday with them in debauchery.”
Ball said he had the names of reliable citizens from both political parties who were willing to “confirm every item” if called upon.
“The issue is evidently not between the two great parties, but between the brothel and the family, between indecency and decency, between lust and law . . . between the degradation of women and due honor, protection, and love to our mothers, sisters, and daughters.”
In a letter that was published in the Boston Journal, Ball had this to say to critics who questioned whether he really had the goods on Cleveland:
As to Mr. C’s drinking, take one fact. He and two other lawyers a few years since visited their club-house on Grand Island, a place of drunkenness and lust, and the three were beastly drunk on their return to the city. Oscar Folsom, esq., (one of them) fell from the carriage and broke his neck. If you desire more facts I will do my best to supply them.
Yours truly,
Geo. H. Ball.
The clubhouse in question, of course, was the Beaver Island Club, where Cleveland and his friends belonged to a social fraternity that came to be known as the Jolly Reefers. The clubhouse had been Cleveland’s second home. When they were building it he had even helped clear the grounds with an ax and applied his lawyerly skills to write the Beaver Island Club constitution. His dearest friends, including Wilson Bissell and Oscar Folsom before his death, had all been members. This was the same thousand-acre resort where Cleveland had taken Frances Folsom for clambakes and picnics when she was a little girl. Now Ball was making the remarkable assertion that Cleveland was present when Oscar Folsom broke his neck after being thrown headfirst from a carriage. According to Ball’s account, Folsom’s fatal injury had come about as he was returning from a wild and “riotous party” on Beaver Island at which Cleveland had been present.
Regrettably for Ball, the facts failed to bear any of this out. In his zeal to destroy Cleveland, he gouged a hole in his own sheath of credibility. Cleveland was not with Folsom when the accident occurred; Folsom’s companion had been the lawyer Warren Miller. Cleveland only appeared on the scene after Folsom was pronounced dead. Further, Folsom was not driving home after a night of revelry at the Beaver Island Club. He had been drinking, that part was true, but it was at the home of Charles Bacon, a Buffalo businessman. What really wrecked Ball’s case was his contention that the Beaver Island Club was a place of booze and debauchery. The Jolly Reefers came from the most esteemed families in Buffalo; by innuendo, Ball was accusing all of them of licentiousness.
Newspapers across America ferociously attacked the George Ball. The New York Post launched a campaign against him that branded his anti-Cleveland letters “filthy and disingenuous.” In a biographical sketch of his life, the Post claimed that Ball had “wandered about a good deal,” making the ludicrous assertion that he had once worked at the U.S. Customs House in New York harbor. As everyone knew, the Customs House was the notorious lair of Republican political hacks, and is rampantly corrupt. The newspaper also claimed that when Ball lived in Owensville, Indiana, he had to “hastily depart, owing to an ‘insult to a Christian lady.’”
“Moreover, he has, we are informed, a remarkable detective love of ferreting out low and disgusting scandals and mysteries.” This was just the beginning.
Four days later, on August 12, the Post resumed its offensive with a vengeance. Ball and his followers were “guttersnipes” and “vampires,” and Ball was a “dynamiter who plants a bomb in the waiting room of a railroad station, thronged with women and children, in order to strike terror in the hearts of other people.” The Post’s editor, Edwin L. Godkin, wrote the articles or personally edited them and had them republished in The Nation magazine, which at that time was a weekly insert owned by the newspaper.
Other newspapers joined in the attack. The pro-Cleveland Boston Herald ran an article under the headline, “The Vile Record of ‘Rev.’ Ball in Gibson County, Ind.”
The “Rev.” Ball, who originated the vile slander on Gov. Cleveland, it has just been learned used to live down in Gibson county, Ind. A Courier-Journal representative who was down in Owensville yesterday interviewed several promin
ent people, from whom it was learned that a number of years ago this same Ball preached to a small congregation, from whom he filched money under various pretenses. He finally became noted over the county as a great liar, and one in whom no trust could be placed. Ball not only became noted as a liar, but one who imbued [sic] very frequently a little too much bad whiskey for a preacher. He was finally expelled from the church, and he left the county. He is so well known down in Gibson county that Republicans as well as Democrats brand him as one of the monster frauds of the county. These facts are authentic and can be verified at any time.
The Herald later had to sheepishly acknowledge that the pastor in the story was not George Ball at all but a Reverend H. S. Ball, who had been excommunicated from his church for scandalous activities. George Ball had never even lived in Indiana. The Herald did run a correction and apology—two years later.
The Post and Herald articles came as a jolt to Ball and his wife, Maria Benchley Ball. They had been married for thirty-six years and raised five children. Ella, their youngest, had just graduated from Hillsdale College in Michigan, of which Ball was a trustee and benefactor. At Hillsdale, all men indeed were created equal—it was the first American college to prohibit in its charter discrimination based on race, religion, or sex. The depressing reality was that, in the raging national debate over his role in disseminating Maria Halpin’s story, Ball’s many worthy achievements were consigned to oblivion. According to certain newspapers in New York and Boston, he was a monster and a fraud who had finally been run out of Indiana after insulting a woman.
Ball could not let the charges against him stand. On August 10, he announced that he was instituting a $25,000 libel suit against the Herald. The New York Post would be next.
A Secret Life: The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland Page 23
