A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [167]
Exalted men require big biographies, and in Robert McNutt McElroy, a distinguished professor of history at Princeton University, Frances believed she had found the perfect collaborator. The Princeton connection aside, Frances and McElroy were also friends. McElroy served with her on the board of trustees at Wells College, and in 1913, she recruited the historian for the presidency of Wells, an offer he declined. Frances gave McElroy her complete endorsement of his Cleveland biography and called on all her late husband’s colleagues to cooperate with him. McElroy commenced work in 1919, and the two-volume Grover Cleveland: The Man and the Statesman was published in 1923. In its 786 pages, there is not one mention of Maria Halpin. McElroy alludes to the scandal only in this roundabout way. “When his friend, Charles W. Goodyear, reported that a particularly violent attack was to be made upon him by the enemy press the following day, regarding an incident in his earlier life, and asked what to say in reply, Cleveland telegraphed: ‘Whatever you say, tell the truth.’ And his friends told the truth.”
In 1932, the historian Allan Nevins published his biography of Grover Cleveland. Nevins taught at Columbia University and wrote more than fifty books during his celebrated career, his most acclaimed work, the epic eight-volume Civil War history Ordeal of the Union. But the book that won him the first of two Pulitzer Prizes was Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage. In his preface, the first person Nevins thanks is Cleveland’s widow, “who threw open his papers and gave invaluable advice.”
Unlike McElroy, Nevins chose not to ignore the scandal, understanding that for the sake of his credibility, it had to be dealt with. He tackled it head-on, but with the unmitigated vilification of Maria Halpin that set the tone for all historians to come. According to Nevins’s account, the Evening Telegraph was a “despised Buffalo rag” whose article, “A Terrible Tale,” was garnished “with unctuous detail” and revealed nothing more than that Cleveland had once “maintained a connection with a Buffalo woman named Halpin whose illegitimate son was later placed in an orphan asylum.”
“After reciting the initial charges, the Telegraph gradually added a series of allegations venomous in their falsity.” Nevins wrote that these accusations emanated from the owners of “saloons and dives” who were out to get Cleveland for his clean-government crusade to root out corruption in Buffalo. As for George Ball, Nevins says the Baptist minister “made himself a national nuisance,” and by posing as “Buffalo’s exponent of decency, he actually gave currency to indecent falsehood.”
In the Nevins book, Cleveland makes a common sense decision in decreeing that his associates tell the truth because “from the truth he had little to fear.” Maria Halpin, Nevins concludes, was a sexual plaything, passed around among the leading lawyers of Buffalo, a harlot who drank to excess and neglected her illegitimate son Oscar. Uncertain about the identity of the father, she fixed on Cleveland because he was the only bachelor among her paramours and “she hoped to make him marry her.” Cleveland did not question paternity because “the other men in the scrape were married.”
“A weaker or more callous man in his place would have tried to, with some prospect of success, deny responsibility for the child; but Cleveland saw the matter through in the most courageous way.” Cleveland, concludes Nevins, “never flinched” and his “subsequent indifference to the child was due to his doubts about his fatherhood.” Put another way, Cleveland conducted himself selflessly, and the Halpin scandal was a high mark in Cleveland’s long life of personal integrity.
When Frances completed reading Nevins’s work, apart from some minor reservations, she pronounced herself satisfied, as well she should have been. It offered, she said, a “true picture—of the man and his meaning.”
To this day, Nevins’s work is regarded