A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [157]
In the local New Rochelle newspapers, Maria’s obituary warranted just a single paragraph in the Press and three paragraphs in the Pioneer, which identified her only as Mrs. Maria B. Hunt, wife of Wallace Hunt—“the well-known stove and furnace dealer.” The newspapers, which were surely aware that she was the Maria Halpin involved in the Cleveland scandal, made no mention of it in all probability because they didn’t want to offend Hunt, whose hardware store was a steady local advertiser.
Others, however, remembered Maria’s place in history, and even in death the insults kept coming her way. In a retrospective of the Halpin scandal, The Brooklyn Eagle made this meanspirited commentary: “Never of a strong nature, mentally and physically, she was disturbed and frightened to such a degree that her nerves were nearly wrecked. The sprightliness which had been her youthful charm had given way to a subdued, even a shrinking manner.” For some mystifying reason, the Eagle chose the occasion of Maria’s death to scold her old friend from Buffalo, Maria Baker. According to the Eagle, Mrs. Baker was an “evil genius,” and her husband a “night hawk” who never “enjoyed the best of reputations.”
“But for this woman [Mrs. Baker], it is doubtful whether there would have been heard anything of the stories in which subsequently the names of Cleveland and Maria Halpin were involved.”
In the years that followed Maria’s death, she was not the only person touched by the scandal who came to a sad end.
Colonel John Byrne had been Buffalo’s superintendent of police when two detectives under his command seized the infant Oscar Folsom Cleveland and threw Maria Halpin into an insane asylum. On October 30, 1909, Byrne was sitting in the stadium at West Point, bursting with pride as he watched his son, Eugene, a fourth-year cadet, play in the Harvard-Army football game. Ten minutes into the second half, Eugene, a robust 175-pound left tackle, was brought down by two Harvard guards. When the gridiron was cleared, he was found to be paralyzed from the neck down. His snow-haired seventy-year-old father wept as he was carried off on a stretcher. Eugene, aged twenty-one, died the next morning, and West Point cancelled the remainder of the football season, including the army-navy game.
Six weeks later, Colonel Byrne suffered an incapacitating stroke at his home in Buffalo. He died on December 30 without regaining consciousness.
Dr. Alexander Bull, the physician whose testimony had done so much damage to Reverend George Ball’s case during the New York Post libel trial, also came to an unexpected end. He was boarding a trolley in front of the Iroquois Hotel in Buffalo and was on the second step when the conductor sounded the signal to proceed, and the trolley lurched forward. The doctor lost his balance and fell backward, hitting his head on the pavement. Bull lingered at death’s door for two weeks before he died. All Buffalo mourned his passing.
John Milburn, the lawyer who had successfully defended the New York Post in the George Ball libel trial, found himself at the center of a national tragedy.
Buffalo in the early 1900s was the eighth largest city in America, with a population exceeding 350,000. In recognition of the city’s prominence, it was named host of the Pan-American Exposition. Buffalo would take its just place next to London, Paris, Vienna, Philadelphia, Chicago, and the other great municipalities of the world to have hosted world fairs. The 342-acre site opened on May 1, 1901, featuring