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By Root 1817 0

called for a special session of Congress to be held on August 7 to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which required the United States to purchase a set quantity of silver every month with a special treasury note that could be redeemed in gold. The misguided law, which had been passed in 1890 during the Harrison administration, was now threatening to deplete the nation’s gold reserve. Charles Hamlin, the assistant secretary of the treasury, went to Gray Gables on July 23 with an important statistical analysis prepared by the treasury department to update the president on the status of the gold supply. Confiding to his diary, Hamlin wrote, “Cleveland appeared not well at all. Had his mouth packed with some kind of bandage. Could not speak distinctly . . . looked thoroughly tired out.” When Attorney General Richard Olney called on Cleveland, he was shocked to see at how much weight the president had lost. His mouth was still stuffed with antiseptic wads, and he could barely speak.

“My god, Olney, they nearly killed me!” Like the rest of the country, Olney had no idea that the president had cancer. He found Cleveland depressed, resigned to imminent death. Olney wondered how the removal of two molars could have caused him to be in this state.

As Cleveland’s mouth healed, he found a peach in the kitchen and ate it—much to his wife’s annoyance, since he was supposed to take only liquids during his convalescence. But his physical endurance was nil, and his hair had thinned out and turned white. He seemed to have become an old man overnight.

E. J. Edwards, a reporter who wrote under the pseudonym Holland for the Philadelphia Press, got a whiff of the president’s true condition. In a roundabout way, the leak had come from Dr. Hasbrouck, the dentist who had administered the anesthesia. Hasbrouck explained to another doctor that he had been unavoidably delayed because he had to operate on a very important patient, none other than President Cleveland. That was quite a name to drop. The doctor who heard the story happened to be a friend of E. J. Edwards. The reporter went to see Hasbrouck and, bluffing his way through the interview, claimed that he only wanted to double-check some of the facts he already knew. Hasbrouck ended up telling him everything. He even gave him the names of all the physicians who were on the president’s surgical team. Even with this solid foundation for a story, Edwards held back. To accuse the Cleveland administration of lying to the American people in this time of national crisis could have historic repercussions, and it could jeopardize the congressional vote to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. Keen, Erdmann, Bryant, and O’Reilly were approached by Edwards, but they all stuck to the story that the president had had routine dental work and nothing more. Erdmann later said he “did more lying” than he had done in his entire life put together.

The White House denials were so vehement that Edwards’s editors had second thoughts and spiked the story for the time being. On August 28, the House of Representatives voted in favor of repealing the silver act, handing Cleveland a major victory. The next day, the Philadelphia Press finally “summoned the nerve” to run with Edwards’s scoop—that the president had a malignancy and part of his jaw had been surgically removed. Once again, Cleveland’s people assailed the messenger. Edwards and the Philadelphia Press were attacked with all the gusto that had been aimed at the long-departed Buffalo Evening Telegraph. The rival Philadelphia Times accused Edwards of writing fiction.

“Mr. Cleveland had suffered so much at the hands of untruthful newspaper correspondents . . . that he felt compelled to seek a quiet spot even to have his teeth looked after,” spewed the Philadelphia Times. Cleveland’s neighbor in Buzzards Bay was quoted as saying, “I have never seen him in better health.”

It took a quarter of a century for the truth to come out. In 1917, at the age of eighty, Dr. Keen decided it was time for the American people to be told the real story. He wrote an