A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [147]
The accounts of Mr. Ball, “the highly respected Baptist minister” who wrote the filthy and disingenuous letters which appeared in the Boston Journal about Governor Cleveland continue to grow worse. He appears indeed to be a sort of politico-clerical adventurer. He is not a Baptist minister at all, a leading Baptist minister in the City informs us, but a Free-will Baptist.
He has wandered about a good deal, being various things by turn and nothing long. He once had a place in the Custom House, and has tried his hand at Journalism in this City, was once in Owensville, Indiana, from which place, the Indianapolis Sentinel says, “he had to depart hastily, owing to an ‘insult to a Christian lady.” In Buffalo, he seems to have been running a little independent machine of his own, the services of which he has been offered for money to both parties indiscriminately, and not much money either, for he takes as little as $25.00 at a time. Moreover, he has as we are informed, a remarkable detective love of ferreting out low and disgusting scandals and mysteries.
This article was published on August 8, 1884.
Moot read to the jurors the next attack by the Post, published three days later. It accused Ball of concocting “extremely disgusting” stories about Cleveland and having a “passion for notoriety which seems to be his most powerful motive.”
The last allegedly libelous article, Moot told the jurors, was published the next day under the headline, “The Rev. Mr. Ball and His Kind.” It reported the results of the independent investigation by sixteen prominent citizens of Buffalo who had cleared Cleveland of wrongdoing in the Halpin matter. In this story, the Post called Ball and his supporters “guttersnipes,” among other choice words.
What shall be said of the vampires, clerical and others, who have been exploring the haunts of infamy to find material for blackening private character and bringing sorrow to households in no way concerned in the present political campaign? It is the common characteristic of such rascals that they care no more for the feelings of innocent persons than a dynamiter who plants a bomb in the waiting-room of a railroad station thronged with women and children, in order to strike terror in the hearts of other people who are out of danger miles away.
They have exposed themselves as persons of depraved taste and imagination as well as liars by instinct. They have done all this without accomplishing the end they had in view, which was to hold Governor Cleveland up as a habitual profligate, a hardened criminal, a deliberate betrayer of women, and a monster of cruelty to the victims of his depravity.
Until the publication of these articles, Moot continued, no one had questioned Ball’s standing as a “God-fearing Christian minister and gentleman.” The articles, he said, had “wounded” Ball’s reputation, “crippled” his work as a teacher and minister, and led to his “utter ruin.”
Moot asked the jury to return with a verdict for Ball in the amount of $25,000 in damages.
Court was recessed for lunch. At two in the afternoon, the trial resumed. Moot called his first witness. It was Edwin Godkin.
The Irish-born Godkin had come to America in 1856 as a correspondent for the London Daily News, and in 1865, he founded The Nation, then as now a weekly magazine with a small but influential readership. In 1881, he sold The Nation to the New York Post and became the Post’s editor-in-chief and an eloquent force in the mugwump political movement. Such was his renown, the reporters who worked for Godkin regarded him as a kind of “remote deity.” On the occasion when he found himself riding in the elevator with a member of his staff at the New York Post building, which then stood at Broadway and Fulton, Godkin never spoke a word. Although he stood on “friendly footing” with his managing editors and the city editor, he could not recognize