A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [103]
“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