A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [130]
Annie Van Vechten finally departed the White House in mid-April and returned to her home in Albany where she lived with her mother. Rose missed her very much and apparently sank into a state of melancholia. She started scaling back her social duties and let it be known that she was canceling all White House receptions for the rest of the social season. Washington’s elite found the entire situation exceedingly disquieting. It seemed that after a mere two months as First Lady, Rose had had enough. She had once contemptuously equated upper-crust society to a salivating and servile dog, specifically a spaniel. Like the spaniel, fashionable people obediently tagged along, drooling at the mouth. Some of the formalities required of her position as First Lady were, in Rose’s estimation, nonsensical; conversely, some of the women who came into contact with Rose regarded her as “rather terrifying.” Was she really conjugating Greek verbs while they were trying to engage her in chitchat?
On April 29, Rose left Washington bound for New York to “recuperate and rest.” The White House would only say that she was taking some time off. The truth was that Rose and her brother had had a major blowout of an argument. To her shame, Rose had told the president that his administration was appointing too many Catholics to high-level government posts. The nation, she said, was facing a “Romanist peril.” It was anti-immigration bigotry straight out of the Know-Nothing party handbook. Cleveland found it “annoying.”
With Rose gone, Dan Lamont’s wife, Juliet, moved into the White House temporarily to run things. Cleveland, writing to his sister Mary, tried to downplay the situation, saying that Libbie, as he called Rose, had gone to New York for “a little rest.”
“She’d had a pretty hard time here,” Cleveland admitted. Reverend Byron Sunderland, pastor of the Presbyterian church where Rose and the president worshipped, offered himself as peacemaker and tried to patch things up, without success. The White House worked overtime to keep a lid on the family turmoil. The stories two newspapermen had written about it may have been accurate, but all the same, the men were banned from covering the administration for having had the nerve to report accounts of the falling out between the Clevelands. Charles A. Hamilton, a reporter for the Buffalo Express, and later the dean of White House correspondents for the Washington Post, found his access to the White House jeopardized when he was accused of spreading the tale that Rose and the president were at each other’s throats. Hamilton became so concerned that he went to Lamont and informed him that he had no intention of writing a word about this “scurrilous” story. Once he had Hamilton’s pledge, Lamont did a good turn and told the reporter he would be “always welcome at the White House.”
The family drama was an authentic crisis for Cleveland, coming as it did on the heels of the Maria Halpin scandal the year before and the misgivings it had raised about Cleveland’s fitness for office. Cleveland had to wonder whether he had blundered in naming his maiden sister First Lady. Perhaps Mary Hoyt would have made the more prudent pick. Like her brother, Mary held to the old-fashioned conviction that “a good wife is a woman who loves her husband and her country with no desire to run either.” The president called on his most trusted aide, Lamont, dispatching him to New York to talk things over with Rose. It was a delicate mission. Obviously, Rose was on the edge, but whatever words and assurances Lamont used, he was persuasive enough to bring Rose back with him to Washington. Once again, Lamont had come through in a pinch.
16
THE BRIDE
GRADUATION FOR WELLS College, class of 1885, took place in June. It was a small ceremony