A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [104]
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