Sex, Lies, and Grover Cleveland

“A Secret Life: The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland” begins with the most shocking scene ever to appear in a presidential biography. Not yet president, Grover Cleveland stands before Maria Halpin, the mother of his illegitimate child, and with a “rough expression” repeatedly orders her: “Give the child to Mrs. Kendall,” the woman he has designated to take care of the baby, leaving behind the bereft mother. This scene in Charles Lachman’s 2011 book derives from affidavits of the principal parties involved in the purported abduction of an infant boy whose mother Cleveland had incarcerated in a mental asylum. Halpin was released after a brief stay.Newspapers during Cleveland’s first presidential run in 1884 reported that he had seduced Halpin. In a later affidavit, she testified that he had raped her. Mr. Lachman relies on that affidavit to depict Cleveland’s brutal treatment of a woman he allegedly promised to marry, then reneged, while contributing to the child’s and the mother’s financial support.In “A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland” (2022), Troy Senik pointed out that Halpin later repudiated the rape charge. He did not consider, however, that other women in Halpin’s precarious circumstances have done the same — retreated from accusations that would be difficult to establish in court against a high-profile, formidable defendant. Cleveland never denied or affirmed his paternity. Citing the standard 1932 biography of Cleveland by Allan Nevins, Mr. Senik reported that Cleveland had doubts that he had fathered the boy.Press accounts called Halpin a harlot, but Charles Lachman provides abundant evidence that she was a respected and even admired widow, with a department store job that she performed with a high degree of professionalism. At the time Cleveland met thirty-three-year-old Halpin he was thirty-seven, well established in Buffalo, and already a 300 pounder who drank a lot of beer and enjoyed relaxing in saloons. He should have been suspect when the scandal erupted because, as Mr. Lachman put it, “almost every portrayal of bachelors in popular culture was negative. They were pariahs, indifferent to the bonds of holy matrimony, dangerous, and possibly even degenerate.” Such negative reports about Cleveland were a staple of newspapers opposed to his presidential candidacy.That Cleveland made no effort to defend himself — even as his associates traduced Halpin’s reputation — stood him in good stead with parts of an electorate impressed with a man who seemed above politics, having built his reputation on his integrity and prosecution of corruption. Furthermore, a rape victim had to prove that she had resisted right to the end of the sexual encounter, to the “fullest extent of her abilities,” and that she had injuries to display. As Mr. Lachman concluded: “the consummation of sex was evidence that, in the end, she had willingly surrendered to her ravishment. And consent — even partial consent — meant that, under the law, she had not been raped.”During the 1884 campaign, Cleveland’s party handlers put it about that he was protecting the real father, his best friend, Oscar Folsom, a married man with a family. As one of Cleveland’s supporters declared: he had “acted a heroic part.” Onto the Cleveland bandwagon climbed the renowned Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, who had been involved in his own sex scandal with a parishioner, to proclaim Cleveland’s nobility. “The scandal,” Mr. Lachman observed, “had somehow been twisted into a badge of honor for Cleveland.”Charles Lachman surveyed the efforts of biographers to ignore or minimize the scandal. Cleveland’s authorized biographer, Robert Nutt McElroy, never mentioned Halpin’s name in his 1923 study. Allan Nevins treated Halpin as a blackmailer who deserved only a few pages in his two-volume biography. Biographer Horace Samuel Merrill employed the customary tactic of Cleveland defenders by emphasizing not what Cleveland might have actually done but how the story first appeared in an anti-Cleveland newspaper, “steeped in sentiment and righteousness,” picked up by other pro-Republican publications and “scandalmongers.” Cleveland maintained a “public pose of dignified silence.” His distinguished public record, not what may have been his private delinquencies, mattered most — even to many of the clergy. Others alleged that Halpin had been an “unsatisfactory mother” and an alcoholic.One clergyman, Merrill reported, said that Cleveland should explain “how far you have done wrong in this matter.” Cleveland had written such a statement, but campaign advisors dissuaded him from issuing it. Instead, they diminished the scandal’s importance while denouncing opponent James G. Blaine’s corrupt politics. In a close election, the Democrats prevailed in New York, ensuring Cleveland’s victory.In “The Presidencies of Grover Cleveland,” Richard E. Welch, Jr. described his subject’s sex life as “fairly restricted, probably confined to a few brothel visits and a brief affair with a widow named Maria Halpin. But the restaurant-saloons of Buffalo, practical jokes and buffoon-style nicknames, fishing expeditions, and hunting camps stocked with whisky and oft-told ribald anecdotes — all provided sources of pleasure and relaxation from the labors of the law.” That Cleveland may have acted crudely did not seem far fetched.Biographer Henry N. Graff called Halpin a fashionable “comely young widow,” who could speak French. Graff supposed: “Possibly Cleveland was seduced as well as the seducer.” She had not been able to “snare Cleveland” and: “Possibly Miss Halpin did not know who the father was and had selected Cleveland because he was the most likely or because he was the only bachelor among the possibilities.” What to make of a biography that begins and ends a sentence with possibilities?In 1894, Paul Leicester Ford’s novel, “The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him,” provided a powerful evocation of how Grover Cleveland became the embodiment of a principled president, and why he won the popular vote for the presidency three times, although he lost his re-election in 1888 in the electoral college.For Ford, Peter is the noble side of Cleveland. Peter takes the blame for fathering an illegitimate child to spare his best friend’s reputation and the humiliation of his family. Peter is “enthroned in Jeffersonian simplicity,” a resonant phrase that calls to mind the pursuit of happiness. Ford’s novel proves nothing while proving everything. Such novels go beyond what can be documented in order to fathom the psyche of a nation. Peter is the demotic favorite who says “If the rich man has his club, let the poor man have his saloon.” For all his high and mighty principles, Peter the cigar-smoking pol, like the cigar-chomping Cleveland, marries conflicting codes of masculine conduct. He is one of the boys but also the fatherly figure society seeks.Toward the end of the novel, various voices articulate Peter’s paradoxical appeal, reflecting Cleveland’s broad attraction to the American electorate:“He is a man of great feeling.”“He is without feeling and necessarily makes no mistake.”“He never seemed to excite envy or bitterness. He had a way of doing things which made people like him.”“Every one he meets trusts him. Yet nobody understands him.”“So he interests people, without exciting hostility.”“I’ve heard person after person say that he was an uninteresting, ordinary man, and yet nobody ever seemed to forget him.”“He had within something he never showed people.”“It was his wonderful capacity for work. . . I’ve known that man to work from nine in the morning to one at night, merely stopping for meals.”“I believe it was because Peter had no wish for worldly success, that it came to him.”“His whole career has been the worst case of sheer, downright luck of which I ever saw or heard.”“He refuses to talk, and every one promptly says: ‘How interesting he is!’”“There is no luck in it . . . It was all due to his foresight and shrewdness. He plans things beforehand, and merely presses the button.”The point of this conflicting testimony is that Peter, like Cleveland, is a projection of what people are looking for in a president. As one of his friends realizes: “Each had found something in Peter that no other had discovered.” This culminating comment is the perfect expression of the novel’s title: “The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him.” Cleveland seemed to sum up just about everything people could think of a president, which suggests that the reasons for his success went beyond what any biographer could possibly encompass.Mr. Rollyson’s book, ‘Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History,’ will be published on Presidents’ Day 2027.

Sex, Lies, and Grover Cleveland

Sex, Lies, and Grover Cleveland

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