A Secret Life: The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland

by Charles Lachman

  KEEPER OF THE FLAME

  DEATH CAME TO Maria Halpin on February 6, 1902, at the age of sixty-six.

  Maria had known when the end was near, and there were things she had to take care of before she passed on. The first was to notify her son, Frederick Halpin, now forty-nine and living in Matamoras, Pennsylvania. A telegram informed him that his mother was dying and he must come at once to New Rochelle.

  Two days before she passed away, Maria wrote out a will. It was a simple document—her personal property was a paltry two hundred dollars, and her real estate holdings amounted to $2,000. That was all. She bequeathed everything to her third husband, Wallace Hunt, whom she had married three years earlier.

  On her deathbed, Maria gave Hunt specific instructions regarding her interment.

  “Do not let the funeral be too public. I do not want strangers to come and gaze on my face. Let everything be very quiet. Let me rest.”

  Frederick arrived in time to bid his mother farewell. Then she was gone, the cause of death recorded as bronchial pneumonia by her doctor, Samuel Beyea. In the little parlor of her home at 47 Hudson Street, she was laid in repose in a stained pine coffin, costing $75. Her sister sat with her, sobbing.

  It was a plain funeral, conducted without a church service. Then a hearse carried the coffin down a rain-slicked country road to the Beechwood Cemetery where Maria was buried next to her second husband, the carpenter James Albert Seacord, who had died in 1894 at age seventy-six. Three dozen chairs had been placed at the gravesite to accommodate the turnout. Eighteen years had passed since the notorious mudslinging election of 1884, and it was said that many of Maria’s neighbors who attended her funeral were unaware of the eventful role she had played in the life of President Cleveland. They knew her as Maria Hunt and never connected her with that notorious Maria Halpin.

  In the local New Rochelle newspapers, Maria’s obituary warranted just a single paragraph in the Press and three paragraphs in the Pioneer, which identified her only as Mrs. Maria B. Hunt, wife of Wallace Hunt—“the well-known stove and furnace dealer.” The newspapers, which were surely aware that she was the Maria Halpin involved in the Cleveland scandal, made no mention of it in all probability because they didn’t want to offend Hunt, whose hardware store was a steady local advertiser.

  Others, however, remembered Maria’s place in history, and even in death the insults kept coming her way. In a retrospective of the Halpin scandal, The Brooklyn Eagle made this meanspirited commentary: “Never of a strong nature, mentally and physically, she was disturbed and frightened to such a degree that her nerves were nearly wrecked. The sprightliness which had been her youthful charm had given way to a subdued, even a shrinking manner.” For some mystifying reason, the Eagle chose the occasion of Maria’s death to scold her old friend from Buffalo, Maria Baker. According to the Eagle, Mrs. Baker was an “evil genius,” and her husband a “night hawk” who never “enjoyed the best of reputations.”

  “But for this woman [Mrs. Baker], it is doubtful whether there would have been heard anything of the stories in which subsequently the names of Cleveland and Maria Halpin were involved.”

  In the years that followed Maria’s death, she was not the only person touched by the scandal who came to a sad end.

  Colonel John Byrne had been Buffalo’s superintendent of police when two detectives under his command seized the infant Oscar Folsom Cleveland and threw Maria Halpin into an insane asylum. On October 30, 1909, Byrne was sitting in the stadium at West Point, bursting with pride as he watched his son, Eugene, a fourth-year cadet, play in the Harvard-Army football game. Ten minutes into the second half, Eugene, a robust 175-pound left tackle, was brought down by two Harvard guards. When the gridiron was cleared, he was found to be paralyzed from the neck down. His snow-haired seventy-year-old father wept as he was carried off on a stretcher. Eugene, aged twenty-one, died the next morning, and West Point cancelled the remainder of the football season, including the army-navy game.

  Six weeks later, Colonel Byrne suffered an incapacitating stroke at his home in Buffalo. He died on December 30 without regaining consciousness.

  Dr. Alexander Bull, the physician whose testimony had done so much damage to Reverend George Ball’s case during the New York Post libel trial, also came to an unexpected end. He was boarding a trolley in front of the Iroquois Hotel in Buffalo and was on the second step when the conductor sounded the signal to proceed, and the trolley lurched forward. The doctor lost his balance and fell backward, hitting his head on the pavement. Bull lingered at death’s door for two weeks before he died. All Buffalo mourned his passing.

  John Milburn, the lawyer who had successfully defended the New York Post in the George Ball libel trial, found himself at the center of a national tragedy.

  Buffalo in the early 1900s was the eighth largest city in America, with a population exceeding 350,000. In recognition of the city’s prominence, it was named host of the Pan-American Exposition. Buffalo would take its just place next to London, Paris, Vienna, Philadelphia, Chicago, and the other great municipalities of the world to have hosted world fairs. The 342-acre site opened on May 1, 1901, featuring the X-ray machine, hydroelectric power, and other technological marvels of the industrial revolution. As a leading citizen of Buffalo, John Milburn was named president of the exposition, and in this capacity, he had extended an invitation to President William McKinley to visit the fairgrounds.

  On September 6, there was a vast throng at the Pan-American Exposition’s concert hall, the Temple of Music, where President McKinley was holding a public reception. He was standing in the great arena, shaking hands with visitors, when Leon Czolgosz, a twenty-three-year-old anarchist, opened fired with a .32 Iver-Johnson six-shooter. The first bullet grazed the president’s chest. McKinley took the full blast of the second shot in the stomach. He was taken by ambulance to the hospital and, later that night, was transported to a private residence at 1168 Delaware Avenue—the home of John Milburn. For the next eight days, the world was focused on Milburn’s house. Delaware Avenue (“Mansion Row”) was roped off, an armed camp, with absolute silence ordered for the president’s comfort. McKinley lingered until September 14, when he uttered his final words, “It is useless, gentlemen. I think we ought to have a prayer.”

  The assassination of McKinley was a calamity for Buffalo, the nation—and for Milburn on a personal level. The bullet that killed McKinley would forever link Buffalo to a presidential assassination; when the Pan-American Exposition officially closed in November, it was found to have lost more than $6 million. Milburn was crushed and could see nothing but enduring heartbreak if he remained in Buffalo. Like his friend Grover Cleveland, he forsook the city that had given him his start and resettled in Manhattan. The vagaries of history passed Buffalo by. In 2010, it was ranked the sixty-ninth largest city in the United States, with a shrinking population of 270,000.

  Rose Cleveland was mesmerized. Before her lay seven miles of sugary white beach and a turquoise bay of exquisite tranquility. For Rose, having been raised in the blustery climate of upstate New York, it was a revelation.

  Rose was in the town of Naples, in the old Confederate state of Florida, where she was accorded a special privilege. It was January 22, 1889, and she had been invited to register as the first guest at the opening of the sixteen-room Naples Hotel. The hotel was the social hub of the new town, founded only three years earlier, with a name designed to evoke the sunny peninsula of Italy. Her room was charming and cozy, and like the other guests, she promptly lost her heart to the town’s simple diversions. She wandered for miles down the beach, gathering pretty shells, and when she returned to the hotel, she rested under the shady porch until it was time for dinner. In the dining room, she feasted on oysters, turtle steaks, wild turkey, and venison and a mouth-watering tray piled with local tropical fruit.

  Other distinguished guests were also checking in. There was a Judge Meier, the railroad tycoon Bennett Young, and a Miss Hattie Snyder from Chattanooga. Then Evan
geline Marrs Simpson arrived in town, the beguiling widow of Michael Simpson, a millionaire merchant from Boston who had made a fortune in hide and leather. Simpson had died in 1884 when he was seventy-five, and had left Evangeline, just twenty-seven, enormous assets that afforded her the luxury of traveling the world in high style. The Naples Hotel was for her a stop on a never-ending tour of the world’s pleasure spots.

  Rose Cleveland and Evangeline Simpson clicked. The young widow had a flare for drama that some people considered excessive but Rose found enchanting. There was chemistry between the two, and Rose fell in love. She called Evangeline her Eve, or “my Viking.” Rose threw herself into the relationship, and Eve reciprocated. The private correspondence between the two women lays bare one of the great forbidden romances of the Victorian Age.

  “Ah, Eve, Eve, surely you cannot realize what you are to me—what you must be. . . . Oh, darling, come to me this night, my Clevy, my Viking, my—Everything. Come!”

  When Florida’s winter season came to an end, Rose had to return to Holland Patent, and Evangeline continued her world travels. The separation cut both women. Rose, sitting in the train’s parlor car in the “home stretch” of the trip to Holland Patent, ached with longing when she took pen in hand and wrote Eve.

  “Oh, Eve, Eve, this love is life itself—or death. I love you, love you beyond belief—you are all the world to me. God bless you.”

  When Rose arrived at the Weeds, she found things a little disorganized after all her months away, and she missed Eve terribly. That night she wrote her again, “You are mine, and I am yours, and we are one.” Rose said she dreamed of being embraced in her lover’s “enfolding arms.”

  “I shall go to bed, my Eve, with your letters under my pillow. I wonder if I will feel alone. God bless thee and keep thee safe.”

  The next day, Rose went to the country store to purchase a supply of ink and stationery and prepared to “attack” another round of letters. In a rush of longing for Eve, she reached back to ancient times for lovers who epitomized their own love: Evangeline was Cleopatra and Rose was Antony.

  “Ah, my Cleopatra,” Rose wrote that day, promising to “crush those Antony-seeking lips.” The letter ended with this erotic possibility: “How much kissing can Cleopatra stand?”

  Rose picked up a book of poems by Robert Browning that must have put her in an amorous mood as she looked forward to the arrival of the afternoon mail—and two letters from Eve. In them Rose read that Eve was wondering whether they would ever see each other again. Rose wrote back, assuring her that their future together was real.

  “Yes, darling, I will be with you, surely, in the Autumn.” Until then, Rose said, she was prepared to drown herself in work—“while I wait.” They solidified plans to rendezvous in New York City. Rose knew she’d be expected to stay at her brother Grover’s townhouse, but she wrote that she could also lodge with Evangeline, if Evangeline so desired. She was teasing. Of course they’d stay together.

  “I could spend most of the time at your hotel—in your room. Ah, how I love you, it paralyzes me—It makes me heavy with emotion.... I tremble at the thought of you—all my whole being leans out to you. . . . Ah, Eve, Eve . . . you are mine by every sign in Earth and Heaven—by every sign in soul and spirit and body.”

  Rose gazed at Evangeline’s photograph and could not take her eyes away—“the look of it making me wild.”

  In 1893, after Grover Cleveland was sworn in for his second term as president, Rose’s relationship with Evangeline cooled off. One reason may have been that Rose, as the sister of the incumbent president, had to be cautious. Any whiff of a scandal questioning Rose’s sexual orientation had to be avoided. None of the Clevelands wanted a replay of the whispered innuendos aimed at Rose when she lived in the White House as First Lady. Around the same time, Evangeline told Rose that she was thinking about settling down and getting married—to a man. The gentleman in question was Henry Benjamin Whipple, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota, a celebrated churchman with a national reputation as a champion of Native American rights. The Sioux called him “Straight Tongue” because he was always honest with them. A widower with six children, he was also thirty-eight years older than Evangeline.

  Naturally, Rose was conflicted. While she was on a visit with her brother at the White House, when night fell and he had gone out, Rose thought things through, and part of her understood Evangeline’s desire for conventionality. She put her thoughts down on stationery embossed Executive Mansion.

  “I wish for your happiness and good,” Rose wrote. While appreciating everything she was going through (“I know you suffer”), she implored Evangeline not to “decide hastily.” But she also promised to “act gracefully” and would support anything that would “give you joy and peace. . . . I love you enough for anything.... That means to take myself out of your way—for a while at least.”

  “God bless you,” Rose told Eve. “You can depend on me.”

  Evangeline was married at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan. As the wedding was an unexpected interlude during a convention of Episcopal bishops in the city, Whipple’s fellow bishops were surprised to say the least. He was seventy-four and Evangeline just thirty-six, although as The New York Times charitably pointed out “the Bishop is in vigorous health, and looks much younger than he really is.” In terms of age, it certainly echoed Evangeline’s first marriage to the aged Boston textile manufacturer Michael Simpson. Whipple and his bride checked into the Buckingham Hotel for their honeymoon.

  To try to forget Eve, Rose traveled to Europe and the Middle East, but wherever she was, she kept in contact with Evangeline, marking time until the day came when they would be together again.

  On May 5, 1893, Cleveland was in the ninth week of his second term in office when he became aware of a “rough spot” on the roof of his mouth. It was in the precise place where he liked to chew his daily cigar. It did not go away, and his discomfort increased until finally, on June 18, he called for the White House physician. Dr. Robert O’Reilly examined Cleveland’s mouth and found an inflamed ulcer about the size of a quarter. The doctor also saw evidence of diseased bone. Cleveland winced as O’Reilly scraped a section and sent it to the Army Medical Museum for a biopsy. He did not identify the patient as the president of the United States. The report came back “strongly indicative of malignancy.”

  Dr. Joseph Bryant, Cleveland’s personal physician from New York, was summoned to Washington. First he read the medical reports, then he conducted his own examination. “What do you think it is, Doctor?” the president casually asked. He had the utmost confidence in Bryant’s medical judgment.

  Bryant looked at his friend. “Were it in my mouth, I would have it removed at once.” He explained that it was a fast-growing malignancy for which the need for an operation was urgent. Bryant refused to take responsibility if Cleveland delayed the procedure by even a month.

  The diagnosis could not have come at a more unfortunate time. The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad had recently filed for bankruptcy, a step that had precipitated a run on the banks and a credit crunch that was rippling through the economy. Panic was in the air. Businesses were paralyzed, and the stock market had crashed. Stabilizing the country’s currency was the Cleveland administration’s uppermost priority. An announcement that the president had cancer of the mouth could trigger a fullscale economic depression, and the 1885 death from throat cancer of Ulysses S. Grant—another habitual cigar smoker—was still fresh in the American people’s collective memory. Hence the president consented to the operation, but only under the strictest confidentiality. No one outside his inner circle must know, not even his cabinet, with the exception of Dan Lamont, who was now serving as secretary of war. The White House issued a low-key statement that President Cleveland was leaving Washington for a few days to join his wife at their summer house in Buzzards Bay in Cape Cod.

  Dr. Bryant coordinated the medical team that would treat the president. He wrote to Dr. William Willi
ams Keen, a surgeon from Philadelphia, to tell him that he was seeking a consultation on a “very important matter.” Keen was renowned in medical circles for his skill with the surgeon’s scalpel. He was also credited with introducing the concept of antiseptic surgery to America at a time when operations were performed without gloves or sterilization of instruments. Bryant and Keen met on a deserted dock in New York City. Only then did Bryant inform Keen, who was sworn to secrecy, that the patient in question was Grover Cleveland. To ensure privacy, Keen agreed to perform the operation on Commodore Elias Benedict’s yacht Oneida, which was moored in New York harbor. The stateroom of the Oneida was disinfected, and an operating table and all necessary instruments and dressings were brought on board. Arrangements were made with a New York dentist, Dr. Ferdinand Hasbrouck, to assist in anesthetizing Cleveland. He was considered the nation’s leading authority on nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas. Keen returned to Philadelphia and packed his bags, keeping his family entirely in the dark about his mission. He told his wife only that he was going away for an “important operation” and would not be returning for several days.

  On the evening of June 13, Keen appeared at Pier A in New York and was taken by launch to the Oneida, anchored off the battery in Lower Manhattan. The entire medical team was already on board, plus a tank of nitrous oxide and a supply of ether. An hour later, the presidential party consisting of Cleveland, Lamont, and Dr. Bryant arrived. Cleveland tried to put everyone at ease. He was introduced to Keen and invited all to sit on deck and enjoy the night breeze. He even lit up a cigar! They chatted for an hour and Keen, who had never met Cleveland, observed that the president seemed anxious about one thing: Would he be able to carry on the duties of office and speak in public without anyone knowing about the operation? Keen explained that if everything went well, his appearance would be normal, though he might have a defective speech pattern. Cleveland seemed to accept this. He spoke about the burdens of the presidency.