A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [107]
The findings were released to the nation in mid-August with the assurances that the investigation had been “carefully and deliberately made.”
“The general charges of drunkenness and gross immorality which are made against Governor Cleveland are absolutely false,” the committee concluded. How had it reached such a judgment? “From personal knowledge,” the committee declared, “as his acquaintances of long-standing.”
As for Maria Halpin, the committee did not seem to know much about the woman at the center of the scandal. Although they professed to have made a careful and thorough investigation, they could not even pin down Maria’s precise age. She could only be described as a widow “between thirty and forty” when she had made Cleveland’s acquaintance. And, like Twining and Hodges, the committee had apparently made no effort to reach out to her.
“The facts of the case show that she was not seduced, and that the allegations respecting her abduction and ill-treatment are wholly false.” In this rendering of the scandal, the Evening Telegraph was a newspaper of “no standing whatsoever,” and George Ball was guilty of spreading stories based on flimsy hearsay.
On August 11, the day the committee report was released, a wave of relief swept over the Cleveland campaign. Unshackled at last to defend its man Cleveland, the Courier was exceptionally venomous in its attacks on Maria Halpin.
“There was no abduction,” it declared. The Evening Telegraph article was replete with “cheap pathos.” The authorities had acted in the best interests of the child. “There was no cruelty. The mother was in a state of intoxication, and she was removed lawfully and with no more force than was necessary.”
Probably for the first time since the “great bombshell” of the campaign had exploded, Cleveland had the upper hand. “Charges Wholly False,” the Boston Globe headline crowed. The Buffalo Courier: “Rev. Mr. Ball Shown Up.” The New York Times: “A Political Scandal Speedily Settled.” Mark Twain added his voice to the minions defending Cleveland. “To see grown men, apparently in their right mind, seriously arguing against a bachelor’s fitness for President because he had private intercourse with a consenting widow! Isn’t human nature the most consummate sham & lie that was ever invented?” Of course, Twain was missing the point: Sex had not been consensual, and Twain had shut his eyes to the forcible removal of Maria from her home to an insane asylum, and of her child from his mother.
Behind closed doors, James G. Blaine’s Republican campaign managers were taking robust steps to stoke the fires of scandal and innuendo around Cleveland. One endeavor was to mail reprints of “A Terrible Tale” to households across America. In Massachusetts, bundles of the Boston Journal investigation were sent to the state’s farthest outposts. Sometimes the effort backfired. When the chairman of the Republican Committee in Franklin County, Massachusetts, received his bundle, he tendered his resignation.
“Have just received your package of Boston Journals containing the detail of the ‘Cleveland Scandal,’ which I suppose you expect me, as a Republican town committee, to distribute,” he wrote back to party headquarters in Boston. “I do not propose . . . to assist in political warfare so mean and contemptible.”
Letters were also sent to clergymen across the nation, pointing out the “abundant rumors” that Cleveland’s immoral behavior had continued well into his tenure as governor of New York. The letters were anonymous but were believed to be the handiwork of R. W. McMurdy, a minister who ran a clandestine Republican Party agency known as the Religious Bureau. They were usually postmarked Philadelphia, the ideal location for such an undercover operation; remote for purposes of denial, but close enough to Republican