A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [88]
Many Democrat and mugwump publications refused to give the Halpin scandal much play, rationalizing their restraint on grounds that the accusations were too lurid for a family newspaper. “They would bring the blush to the cheek of every son and daughter of the Empire State who read them,” explained one broadsheet in Rochester. The New York Times and the pro-Cleveland Buffalo Courier and Buffalo Express were also stricken deaf and dumb. Dead silence too from the Buffalo Evening News, whose owner, Edward Butler, was a friend of Grover Cleveland’s. Daniel Manning’s Albany Argus also suppressed the story, referencing it only in the context of an editorial that disparaged the coverage of the scandal as “beneath notice.” Other newspapers rallied to Cleveland’s defense. Pulitzer’s New York World denounced the Evening Telegraph as “unscrupulous” and categorized the attacks on Cleveland’s character as “gross, cowardly and unmanly.”
In Buffalo, John Cresswell continued pouring it on.
“The Telegraph is little, but it is mighty and will prevail,” Cresswell wrote. He called Cleveland a “moral leper” who “should never have been allowed to become governor.” Cresswell claimed that his paper had performed a disagreeable but nevertheless imperative public service in stripping the mask from Cleveland and exposing the candidate’s “hideous moral deformity.” It also addressed the gentlemen of the press who were expressing holy horror over the graphic language used in reporting “A Terrible Tale.”
“You print as bad stories as that every day—stories of rape, incest, seduction, abduction. You deceive nobody. The Telegraph ’s story needed to be told.”
Cresswell gleefully noted how Cleveland’s managers seemed to have been afflicted with paralysis—“when everybody knows that they would make a fearful noise if the charge had been groundless. His partisans here do not deny it, they merely grate their teeth in rage and abuse the paper that dared to tell the truth.” He had a point, and other newspapers also noted the absence of any official refutation of the facts by the governor.
“What Grover Cleveland’s defense in this Halpin case may be, if he ever attempts one, I am unable to discover,” declared the managing editor of the Detroit Evening Journal.
Letters poured into the Evening Telegraph. Mrs. O. K. Smith of West Eagle Street in Buffalo wrote, “All honor to the bravest paper in Buffalo! Women, if you have any influence use it.” A clergyman who requested anonymity mailed this letter to the editor:
You are to be commended for the cleanliness of your recital—it was not your fault that its details were so gross and shocking. For what you have so boldly and yet carefully done, you deserve a hearty vote of thanks from the whole American people.
But within the Evening Telegraph’s uncompromising posture there lay a nub of concern. The newspaper said it was confining its coverage strictly to the Maria Halpin case, leaving George Ball (whom it had yet to publicly identify as its principal source) on his own to defend the assertions—that Cleveland had been beastly drunk and had associated with lewd women—published in “A Citizen’s Statement.” In regard to these claims, the Evening Telegraph signaled that it was up to Ball to fend for himself.
It was the Chicago