A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [58]
His true ambition, he confided to Hudson, was to be named a state supreme court justice.
Hudson pondered everything Cleveland had to say. “Well, Mr. Mayor,” he said, “when a man plunges into the political stream, he soon becomes subject to its current.”
Two nights before the opening of the convention, Daniel Manning’s brother John paid an unexpected call on Cleveland at City Hall. John Manning owned four breweries in Buffalo, so he had clout in town. He came as an emissary from his brother, the state party chairman. In his talk with Cleveland, he used the word treachery without directly accusing Cleveland. But the insinuation was in the air. There was no way Cleveland could prevail, John Manning informed the mayor. Slocum was too famous and Flower too rich. Why not settle for the nomination of a congressman-at-large from New York State?
Cleveland just sat there. But the moment Manning left his office, Cleveland hurriedly wrote a letter to his law partner, Wilson Bissell, who was already in Syracuse at the state convention corralling delegates. It was one in the morning.
“John B. Manning has been in to see me tonight,” Cleveland reported. “Now do just as I tell you without asking any questions.” He instructed Bissell to track down Daniel Lockwood and Samuel Scheu—Cleveland’s floor managers—and have them find Daniel Manning in Syracuse and “urge with the utmost vehemence my nomination.
“Never mind what he says—have them pound away.” It had to be drilled into Manning’s head that Cleveland was unswerving, and that he was not going to be “placated” with a run for Congress.
Meanwhile, the Cleveland forces, such as they were, gathered in Syracuse. Tim Mahoney, accompanied by a brawny aide, pulled into the train depot carrying armloads of Grover Cleveland lithographs, which were distributed to all the delegates, to the derision of a New York Tribune correspondent, who reported that the posters were causing “considerable merriment.” It was all a big joke to the sophisticates from downstate.
But Mahoney was chipping away. “He’s our kind of people,” he assured all his friends from the Catholic association. Bissell was also making the rounds of the delegates. Many of them seemed receptive to Cleveland but wanted to meet the candidate in person. Bissell and the other floor managers “inundated” Cleveland with telegrams pleading with him to come to Syracuse. Cleveland was never much for pressing the flesh. Even so, he heeded their advice and took the next available train, stewing the entire time. “It was almost beyond my understanding what to do, or for what purpose I was needed at Syracuse,” he complained.
At dusk, he reached Syracuse, where he was greeted with “bombshell” news.
Word had come down that the Republican convention in Saratoga had denied the incumbent governor, Alonzo Cornell, the nomination for reelection. It was a huge shock to everyone. In his place, U.S. treasury secretary Charles J. Folger had been given the nod. The robber baron Jay Gould was seen as the invisible hammer behind the power play, acting with the connivance of President Chester A. Arthur and former New York senator Roscoe Conkling. Cornell and Conkling hated each other. It all reeked of machine politics at the highest national level.
In Syracuse, Democrats realized that the ham-fisted Republicans had committed an act of self-immolation. A Democratic politician with a clean record of independence could actually win the statehood. It was as if the stars had aligned for