• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Have you seen this?” he asked. Everyone nodded.

“What are we going to do?” In his prepared address to the delegates, he had said the campaign of 1884 was all about morals, not politics. Now this.

“How can we possibly continue our support of Cleveland?”

Almost everyone at the dinner table had something to say. Somebody pointed out that when Cleveland ran for mayor and governor, none of his opponents had ever alluded to this Maria Halpin. Besides, who knew if the story was true? In this overheated political year, with emotions at fever pitch, nothing about any candidate in any newspaper should be taken at face value.

Curtis was not persuaded. A mugwump from Chicago who was seated next to Schurz had sat there mute, absorbing everything, saying nothing—until this moment.

“Do you want to know how this matter strikes me?” Everyone encouraged him to speak his mind.

“Well, from what I hear, I gather that Mr. Cleveland has shown high character and great capacity in public life, but that in private life his conduct has been open to question, while, on the other hand, Mr. Blaine in public life has been weak and dishonest, while he seems to have been an admirable husband and father.” Everyone nodded. So far, no one could disagree with his assessment of the two candidates. He was urged to go on.

“The conclusion I draw from these facts is that we should elect Mr. Cleveland to the public office which he is so admirably qualified to fill and remand Mr. Blaine to the private life which he is so eminently fitted to adorn.”

They all chortled; given the quandary they faced, they welcomed the gallows humor. Whom to support for president—Cleveland, with his sexual indiscretions? Or Blaine, who had taken bribes from the railroad?

There was a consensus: The mugwumps were holding fast for Cleveland—at least for the time being.

For the governor, the publication of “A Terrible Tale” could not have come at a more mortifying time: On July 21, the day it came out, Frances Folsom turned twenty. She and her mother were in Albany to celebrate her birthday with Cleveland and the triumph of his presidential nomination. Now, all they could do was try to comfort the man who stood accused by his hometown newspaper of raping a widow, fathering her illegitimate son, and consorting with lewd women.

Surely, Cleveland felt deeply ashamed. For ten years he had lived with the fear that his dark secret could be exposed at any moment. So fearful had he been of the disclosures his presidential candidacy might precipitate that he had had to be pushed into the race—and was crestfallen when he won it. To quote the Evening Telegraph, “The mine that has long slumbered under the feet of Grover Cleveland has at last been exploded.”

Cleveland, waiting for the inevitable fallout, got wind that his friends in Buffalo were brazenly ignoring his instructions to “tell the truth,” and were taking steps to discredit Maria Halpin. He was indignant when he learned that Charley McCune, publisher of the Buffalo Courier, in his effort to support the paper’s candidate, was spreading the venomous story that the father of Maria’s illegitimate son was not Cleveland at all. According to this tall tale, the boy’s biological father was actually Oscar Folsom.

“I learned last night that McCune had started the story and told it to newspapermen (one at least) that I had nothing to do really with the subject of the Telegraph story—that is, that I am innocent—and that my silence was to shield my friend Oscar Folsom,” Cleveland wrote Daniel Lockwood. “Now is this man crazy or does he want to ruin anybody? Is he foolish enough to suppose for a moment that if such was the truth (which it is not, so far as the motive for silence is concerned) that I would permit my dead friend’s memory to suffer for my sake? And Mrs. Folsom and her daughter at my house at this very time!

“This story of McCune’s of course must be stopped. I have prevented its publication in one paper at least.”

Maria Halpin’s name swiftly circulated around the nation. Newspapers in New York, Chicago, Boston,