A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [73]
“You must go to Chicago at once,” Manning told Hudson, adding that somebody else would have to complete his work. Right now he was urgently needed on the ground in Chicago to open the Cleveland-for-President headquarters. “Stand for the cause till we get there.”
When Hudson arrived in Chicago, he found the city in the grip of anti-Cleveland fervor. Emissaries from Tammany Hall were stirring up the populace and spreading poison about Cleveland such as that he was an anti-Irish bigot. There was also some crazy rumor that Cleveland had hidden away “illegitimate progeny.” It didn’t take any brilliant investigative work on Hudson’s part to determine the source of the smear campaign: It was Cleveland’s old adversary from Albany, State Senator Thomas F. Grady, recently ousted from his senate seat in a Cleveland-inspired coup. Now a full-time Tammany Hall operative, Grady was in Chicago making the rounds of the newspapers and saloons and hotels and telling anyone he could grab by the lapels that Cleveland was “bitterly hostile to anything related to Catholicity” and a dissolute drunkard besides. Intelligent people who should have known better actually believed this propaganda, and Hudson found to his bewilderment that the whispering campaign was gaining traction.
Hudson set up shop downtown at the Palmer House, in three of the hotel’s largest parlors, and hung a portrait of Grover Cleveland over the entryway. He did what he could to “neutralize” Grady’s mischief and privately reassured the newspaper boys and local politicos that Cleveland harbored no animosity toward the Irish.
Delegates and their cronies by the thousands started pouring into Chicago. Boss John Kelly of Tammany Hall controlled half the Manhattan delegates going to the convention. The rest of the delegation stood solid for Cleveland. But the flashy Kelly was the rogue star everybody wanted to hear from. Fearless, always the showman, Kelly and 700 Tammany “braves” pulled into Chicago on July 6 on board two chartered trains—each twenty-five cars in length, one train having tailed the other all the way from New York. Everyone climbed out wearing pearl-colored stovepipe hats and marched in formation to the Palmer House where they were staying, with Kelly and a brass band in the lead.
After he had cleaned up from his long trip, the sixty-two-year-old Kelly met with reporters and delivered his opening salvo against Cleveland.
“I would regard Cleveland’s nomination very much in the light of party suicide,” he said. “It would kill us.”
“Will you support Governor Cleveland if he is nominated?”
Stroking his neatly trimmed beard, Kelly said, “I will not lift a hand for him.”
“Will you oppose him?”
“You can print this as coming from me,” Kelly said, and in case anyone missed it the first time, he repeated his declaration of utter hostility to the governor of his own state: “I will not lift a hand to aid in the election of Grover Cleveland if he is nominated.” Revenge tasted sweet to Boss Kelly. Cleveland had built his good government credentials by turning his back on Tammany Hall, and for that the candidate was now paying the price.
The hub of the action was the Palmer House. Every room was taken, and the lobby and hallways were jammed with men perspiring in Chicago’s summer heat. At the bars it was standing room only, and it was said that some of the New Yorkers were a “trifle careless in their use of stimulants.”
Intrigue followed Kelly wherever he went. Every now and then, a rebel yell could be heard coming from his room. Kelly enjoyed being the center of attention. He stayed up well past midnight his first night in Chicago, consulting with General Benjamin Butler. He was the former governor of Massachusetts who had come to Chicago, having already won—but not yet formally accepted—the presidential nomination of two minor populist parties, the Anti-Monopoly Party and the Greenback Party. Now he was seeking the Democratic nod. Butler had an inflated sense of self-importance, but he had done some notable things in his life—as governor,