• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

This is the terrible story of Maria Halpin and her son.

So it was done.

Now Cresswell and the staff of the Evening Telegraph braced themselves for the repercussions that were sure to follow.

10

DEFAMED

IN BUFFALO, CLEVELAND’S closest advisors were going to pieces. Some of them split the city into sectors and went around to all the major newsstands trying to buy up every available copy of the Evening Telegraph. When the newspaper fired up its steam presses to keep up with the demand, they gave up.

Cleveland’s friend Charles Goodyear urgently telegraphed Cleveland requesting a set of instructions on how to deal with the Evening Telegraph’s revelations. Hunkered down at the Executive Mansion in Albany, Cleveland responded to Goodyear in a telegraphed message that was destined to go down in the annals of American crisis management: “Whatever you do, tell the truth.”

Daniel Manning, the state party chairman, recommended what seemed like a levelheaded course of action: Officially, say nothing. Ignore the allegations, and pray that the scandal dies a natural death. The election was still a long way off—fourteen weeks, a lifetime in politics. People forget. This made sense to Cleveland, and he signed off on the approach. But Cleveland was very much in a state of disgrace and said to be “filled with anguish.”

“I am all ‘out,’” he admitted to Daniel Lockwood, the U.S. congressman from Buffalo who had placed his name in nomination as the party’s presidential candidate.

On the night of July 22, eight hundred independent Republicans known as mugwumps—a word from the Algonquin language that means “person of importance”—gathered at the University Club in Manhattan. High spirits filled the hall as delegates from sixteen states marched in to make official their historic resolution to cross party lines and endorse Grover Cleveland for president. In an era when party loyalty came first, this was not an easy call to make. Predictably, Blaine was denounced as unfit for office, while Grover Cleveland was praised as incorruptible. George Curtis presided over the convention. Curtis had been there from the beginning—he was a founder of the Republican Party. Even he was defecting from the party of Lincoln and backing Cleveland. These were heady days for the cause of reform in America.

“The issue of the present campaign is moral, not political,” Curtis told his fellow delegates. The platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties were virtually indistinguishable on the key concerns of the day. Both parties supported civil service reform and opposed prohibition. The fundamental question in the campaign was not policy but personality: Grover the Good of New York, or Blaine of Maine and his sketchy political history.

The motion before the mugwumps to endorse Cleveland for president passed unanimously.

When the convention adjourned for the night, everyone seemed gratified with the great and important work that had been accomplished. But as they were leaving the University Club, they heard a strange rumbling that quickly grew to a roar. Copies of the Evening Telegraph exposé, hot off the presses from Buffalo, were being distributed to the delegates. As they read it, their elation was quickly replaced by alarm, and even “great revulsion.” Grover Cleveland—a libertine? Could this be true?

Carl Schurz, a former United States senator from Missouri, had invited several of his fellow mugwumps for a private dinner at the University Club after the convention had concluded. Schurz was renowned for the memorable speech he had once made on the floor of the Senate: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” Seated at the head of the table, he was in a deep state of depression, shell-shocked over the Evening Telegraph’s allegations. He had staked his reputation on Cleveland.

At the end of the glum dinner, as everyone was getting ready to leave, the door to the private dining room was flung open, and George Curtis walked in. His face was a “picture of woe.” The Evening Telegraph