A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [113]
When the crowd finally quieted down, Beecher said, “I hope you feel better now?”
Everyone roared with laughter.
When it got quiet, forty reporters had pens poised to take down every word Beecher said.
Beecher began by laying down his credentials as a faithful Republican.
“Before many of you were born, I was rocking the cradle of the Republican Party. I fought its early battles when it was in an apparently hopeless minority. I advocated it, speaking day and night, at the risk of my health and my life itself. When the war broke out, I sent the only boy I had big enough to hold a musket, and greatly grieved was my oldest child, a daughter, that she was not a boy.” The audience guffawed.
“And yet I am now opposing the party whose cradle I rocked. I am a personal friend of Mr. Blaine.” More laughter “And for more than ten years I have been afraid of the man—the man that needed a congressional committee to investigate whether he was honest or not.
“Our country needed a sterling, honest man, and Cleveland is the man.” At this point, the cheers were so loud that Beecher scolded the audience. “Don’t occupy so much of my time. Let me go on and I will imagine you are clapping all the time, only let me go on.” They quieted down. Then Beecher came to the Halpin scandal.
“In all the history of politics, we don’t believe that lies so cruel, so base, so malign have ever been set in motion. The air is murky with stories of Mr. Cleveland’s private life. We find that they are circulated in many cases by rash and credulous clergymen. They could not go to Cleveland with honest inquiry, so they opened their ears to the harlot and the drunkard.”
Now Beecher came around to his own troubles, to the time nine years before when he had been brought to trial for adultery.
“I know the bitterness of venomous lies. I will stand against infamous lies that seek to sting to death a man. Men counsel me to ponder lest I stir again my own griefs. No! I will not be prudent. I will imitate the noble example set me by Plymouth Church in the day of my calamity. They stood by me with God-inspired loyalty. It was a heroic deed. I will imitate their example, and as long as I have breath, I will not see a man followed by hounds, serpents, or venomous stinging insects and not, if I believe him innocent, stand with him and for him and against all comers.”
With that, he was done. He was seventy-one but had delivered his speech with the vigor of a lion.
“Will there be any more speaking?” somebody wondered.
“Of course not” came the reply. “Who could follow that speech?”
The Rink started clearing out.
Beecher, reported the Brooklyn Eagle, was simply grand. The words tumbled off of his lips like that of a great swordsman. It was the “grandest oration” ever heard in the city—“an oration such as a man is fortunate to hear once in a long lifetime.”
The speech by Henry Ward Beecher left Maria Halpin confounded. It seemed to her that the great preacher had actually had the temerity to call her a harlot. She had to wonder how Grover Cleveland came to be the injured party. The scandal had somehow been twisted into a badge of honor for Cleveland.
When she told her uncle James Seacord that she thought it was time to speak out about her relationship with Cleveland, he warned her that if she did, he would kick her out of the house. He was “immovably opposed” to her going public.
But Maria could not shake off the things Horatio King had said about her in his New York World interview—that she had been intimate with as many as four men besides Cleveland, and that Cleveland had assumed responsibility for Baby Oscar because he was the only unmarried man among her numerous lovers. For Maria, Beecher’s speech was confirmation that the American people had totally bought into these falsehoods. But her honor was at stake, and she may have come to the conclusion that she had