A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [141]
There had been another milestone worthy of attention—not a marriage, but the demise of a newspaper.
On the afternoon of August 17, 1885, the staff of the Buffalo Evening Telegraph was shocked to see Ed Butler, the owner of the rival Evening News, in the newsroom. Butler appeared there with his business manager, his brother J. Ambrose Butler. Everyone gathered around.
“Gentlemen,” Ed Butler said, “I have purchased the Telegraph, and after today, it will be issued from the office of the News.”
What followed was the wholesale slaughter of the Evening Telegraph staff. Allen Bigelow, the editor, was asked to resign. So were the state editor and the paper’s three top reporters. John Cresswell, the editor responsible for “A Terrible Tale,” had resigned four weeks earlier after the Scripps brothers privately informed him that they were putting the Evening Telegraph on the market. Negotiations had otherwise been conducted in the strictest secrecy, and Cresswell’s brother, Harry, a reporter on the Telegraph’s staff, was now also informed that his services were no longer required. Everyone pulled together and put out one final edition. The lead story was the publication’s own obituary.
And so the Evening Telegraph ceased to exist. Had the 1884 election gone the other way, it would have gone down in history as the gutsy little newspaper whose exposé had brought about Cleveland’s defeat and ensured Republican rule for another four years. But it’s greatest scoop, “A Terrible Tale,” became its undoing. Advertisers had been running away from the newspaper. No Buffalo business could afford to be associated with a newspaper that topped the president’s enemies list. Circulation had stagnated at ten thousand, and the Telegraph was $70,000 in the hole. Now it had been killed off by Grover Cleveland’s chum, Ed Butler. The sale was absolute and unconditional. It included everything in the building, even the cast metal typeface and the four-cylinder rotary press. The subscription list was folded into the Evening News.
The first edition of the consolidated newspaper rolled off the presses on August 18, 1885.
Four weeks after her brother’s marriage to Frances Folsom, Rose Cleveland moved out of the White House. Her era as First Lady had lasted fourteen months. She also left Washington—“simply because her heart was not there.” She was when she departed as she had been when arrived—an enigma. Rose returned to Holland Patent and, in July, published her first novel, a romance titled The Long Run. The central character, Emeline Longworth, seemed to be drawn from the life of Frances Folsom. Emeline was a rich and “haughty beauty” from Philadelphia society who was being courted by a priggish theological student, Rufus Grosheck—shades of Charles Townsend? The book received solid reviews, and not long after, Rose published a collection of essays, George Eliot’s Poetry and Other Studies, in which intriguingly, one of the essays dealt with the life of Joan of Arc. So Rose was reflecting on two great sexually ambiguous historical figures: George Eliot, the pen name of the English novelist Mary Anne Evans; and Joan of Arc, who dressed as a man to conceal her true sex.
The Cleveland family home in Holland Patent was a humble little cottage, but befitting her new social status, Rose now christened it with a whimsical name, the Weeds. One day in late September 1886, she smelled a whiff of smoke coming from the fireplace and went to sleep thinking that the chimney needed cleaning. At five in the morning, she woke up and realized that her house was on fire. She ran out and sounded the alarm. Volunteers saved the Weeds from total destruction, but it was considerably damaged by smoke and water. It was a double blow because Rose had spent the previous three