Grover's Secret

Another day, another scandal

Aug 09, 2024

Release Date: August 9, 2024

Aimee Henry’s and Mary Martha Parker’s story of illegitimacy, secrets, deception and manipulation is a doozey, but was by no means the only extraordinary bastard story of the late 19^th century, nor even the most famous. That honor – or dishonor, if you prefer – might just go to Maria Hovenden Halpin and her son, Oscar Folsom Cleveland, the illegitimate child of Grover Cleveland, the 22^nd and 24^th president of the United States.

Given the circus-like atmosphere of the current election cycle, how could I not share this not-so-lost story, right? Oh, and did I mention that Grover is, to date, the only president to serve nonconsecutive terms?

Welcome to the Circus

In the fall of 1873, Maria Halpin was a 38-year-old widow and mother of two working as a clerk at a Buffalo, NY dry goods store when a mutual acquaintance introduced her to a 37-year-old confirmed bachelor named Grover Cleveland. A local attorney with political ambitions, Grover quickly set about courting Maria, and, despite Victorian decorum, was a frequent visitor at her rooms in a local boarding house.

There’s some question as to where Maria’s children, 10-year-old Frederick and eight-year-old Ada were living while all this was going on. In one interview, Maria claims Frederick was living with her at the time, but most accounts have both children living with family members in New Hampshire following their father’s death.

On December 15, several months after the two were introduced, Grover invited Maria to join him for dinner, and she said yes. Dinner led to drinks, and drinks led back to Maria’s rooms, and six weeks later, Maria realized she was pregnant.

She sent a note to Grover who, depending on the version being told, came over and either laughed the whole thing off, threatened to cause Maria bodily harm or promised to make her an honest woman.

On September 14, 1874, nine months and one day after what Maria would later call her ‘ruin’ by Grover, Oscar Folsom Cleveland was born at a Buffalo maternity home for unwed mothers. The little boy was named after Grover’s best friend and law partner but bore the Cleveland family name.

Curious naming structure, right?

Years later, Grover would admit he wasn’t sure the boy was his, but had agreed to make provisions for the child because he was a bachelor, and the other potential fathers of the boy were all married. No names were ever given as to the other possible fathers, but who names an illegitimate child after their best friend? ¹

Anyway, although Grover was willing to arrange and pay for Maria and her child to live in a nicer boarding house, he was not willing to marry the woman, which apparently didn’t sit well with Maria.

Here’s one newspaper account of what happened next:

“[Maria] persisted in her demand that [Grover] should marry her and thus at least partially remove the stain on her honor, save his boy from shame and relieve her misery. Her appeals did not move him, and she took to drink to drown the grief that was consuming her.

As time rolled on and it became apparent that the future man of destiny would not take the only step possible to even partially repair the wrong he had done, the wronged woman grew desperate and frequently threated the life both of her boy and her father.” ²

By March of 1876, things had gotten so out of hand that Grover consulted a former colleague and local judge about having Maria committed to a mental hospital.

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Rev. Dr. Kinsley Twining, a leader in Buffalo’s academic and literary community who, according to his published statement, was compelled by community members, his peers and, it can be assumed, his own curiosity to investigate the allegations Maria made against Grover, picks up the story.

“The facts which have been blown up into a case of kidnapping are that the child being neglected and in danger of death, Mr. Cleveland took into his confidence Judge Burrows, a citizen whose high character is clearly enough proved by the fact that he was then trustee of the Protestant Orphan Asylum. Under his persuasion the child was surrendered by the mother to the orphan asylum, and regular papers resigning her parental rights made out.

The entry in the books is that March 9, 1876, Oscar Halpin, born September 14, 1874, was received from his mother, Maria B. Halpin, at the board rate of $5 per week, which, presumably, Mr. Cleveland was to pay through Judge Burrows. Finding that in the surrender of the child she had lost her claim against Mr. Cleveland, Mrs. Halpin endeavored to recover him, and finally, as the asylum records give it, April 28, 1876, he was ‘stolen’ by her.” ³

Dramatic, perhaps, but nothing compared to the harrowing account presented by Grover’s most ardent political adversaries.

[Grover] procured the services of two detectives, both of whom are now living in Buffalo, and they sought to divine [Maria’s] intentions and work some scheme by which she and her child could be separated and removed to where they would not worry the man who should have been the husband and one of them and is the father of the other. They could find nothing out from the woman and do nothing to her. Naturally enough, Mr. Cleveland’s desperation increased.

Finally one night in the fall of 1877 one of these detectives and a physician now living in this city surreptitiously entered the rooms at 11 Genesee Street where Maria Halpin still lived with her son, who was at that time about two-and-a-half years old. They forcibly seized the mother of Grover Cleveland’s son, and despite her cries and stubborn resistance tore her from her baby, rushed her down the stairs, violently dragged her into a hack they had in waiting, and within an hour landed her in the Providence Lunatic Asylum on Main Street near Humbolt Parkway.

The rending cries of the woman and the heartrending cries of her baby aroused some of the neighbors, but the work of abduction was so brutally and speedily done by Cleveland’s hired men that they got their victim off before the people got any notion of what the unusual proceeding meant.

There was no pretense of legal warrant for the seizure, and the poor woman was landed in the asylum without legal process. The detective who assisted in the dirty work told an acquaintance soon after that he got less than $50 for the job, and said the woman resisted so stoutly that it took all his nerve and strength to overpower her. To use his own words: ‘It was a hell of a time’.” ⁴

By most accounts, Maria was drunk upon arrival, and remained under the care of the asylum’s staff for three to five days, after which was allowed to leave. She then hired an attorney, and eventually took physical, if not legal custody of her son.

Sometime later, and after repeated attempts to force Grover to marry her, Maria accepted a cash payment of $500, returned Oscar to the orphanage, and left town.

Of course, at the time, none of this was of any interest to anyone beyond perhaps family and close friends of the participants, and surely not published for public consumption.

But then, within a three-year span, Grover leapfrogged from being just another lawyer to being Buffalo’s mayor (1882), to being the governor of New York (1883), to being the 1884 Democratic candidate for the highest office in the land, President of the United States.

Suddenly every journalist, talking head and political operative in the country was interested in the moral fiber and private life of the man who could potentially lead America.

Almost immediately the story of Maria Halpin was headline news. And then it became a full-blown media circus.

Library of Congress, https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2016/11/election-week-special-the-dodger-and-the-election-of-1884/

The Wet Nurse Leaks

During the heat of the scandal surrounding Maria Halpin, Grover Cleveland and little Oscar Folsom Cleveland, the Chicago Tribune published an interview with Amy Mills Kendall, a woman who claimed to have served as wet nurse for Oscar shortly after his birth. Amy was married to William Kendall, and William was the brother of Sarah Kendall King. Sarah and her husband, Dr. James Edward King SR, would eventually adopt little Oscar.

James, it should be noted, was the attending physician at Oscar’s birth, and he and Grover shared a mutual friend in Judge Roswell Burrows.

But, back to Amy. She and William had welcomed a son of their own just 12 days after Maria gave birth to Oscar, and shortly after that, Amy claimed that James, Sarah and little Oscar arrived at her East Buffalo home.

I’ll let Amy tell the story from there:

“They both urged me to [take Oscar] and told me several times that I could call him my twin baby. I finally consented, and they left the child. All of its clothing was marked ‘M.H.”, except some handkerchiefs, which were marked ‘Maria Halpin’. They told me to call him Jack, and to take all his clothing and replace it with new, and give them back the marked clothing. This was done. We virtually had the child hid, and largely at the request of Dr. King. The mother of the child never came to my house.”

Later, however, Amy claimed she did meet Oscar’s mother during a meeting which she said took place at Grover’s law office.

‘‘On one occasion the doctor and his wife came in a hack and said they wanted me to take the baby down to its father’s office. I rigged the child up and took it down with Dr. King. After we reached there a strange lady came in, and, running up, snatched the child out of my arms without saying a word to me. She acted as though she was crazy, and I was much alarmed. She said: ‘O, my baby, open your eyes and let me see them.’ Baby was asleep. ‘O, my precious baby, why don’t you open your eyes once more?’ She held it some time, talking that way. The lawyer said to her several times, ‘Give the child up to Mrs. Kendall,’ and made a rough expression to her. She cried all the time as though her heart would break.”

The strange woman, Amy claimed, was Maria.

Amy continued to care for Oscar for what she said was somewhere between one and two years. Then one day out of the blue, she was told by James to gather up all of Oscar’s things and return the toddler to his mother. She must not, however, enter the house, nor tell anyone where she and the child lived.

“…when we reached the house, an elderly lady came out and told me to bring the baby in. I replied, ‘Dr. King told me not to go in.’ She then went back and came out again, saying I must carry the child in and place it in its mother’s arms. I thought it all over and came to the conclusion it was best for me to carry it in. She was the same Maria Halpin I had seen in Lawyer Cleveland’s office, and when I asked her if she was the baby’s mother, she answered: ‘Yes, I am Maria Halpin, baby’s own mother’.

She held it in her arms and hugged and kissed it, and seemed overjoyed to have it restored to her. She was crying, and hysterical, and much excited, which frightened baby, and I nursed it to quiet the little fellow. She wanted to know where I lived, but acting under instructions I refused to tell her. She said Dr. King and that other man, the lawyer, were villains, and she called them very hard names, yet she did not, with all her bitterness, utter Cleveland’s name.”

Upon returning home alone, Amy said she found several items belonging to Oscar which she’d forgotten to pack up, including a pair of stockings and cap which Maria had knit for her son. Tucked inside the cap was, according to Amy, a picture of Grover Cleveland with the words ‘baby’s papa’ written on the back. ⁵

It’s a touching story, no doubt, but it also contradicted much of what Maria herself swore to in various affidavits and statements she made, specifically that Oscar lived with her at the boarding house until that fateful day when the detectives ‘kidnapped them’, bringing Oscar to an orphanage and her to the insane asylum.

Still, like most partisan propaganda, the story served its purpose, convincing people who already disliked Grover that he truly was a letch and unfit for office, and convincing those who already favored him that he was an honorable man under vicious attack from the biased press and political enemies.

Nothing new under the sun, right?

Election Eve Confession

Six days before Americans went to the polls on Tuesday, November 4, 1884, Maria Halpin wrote out and signed a sworn statement detailing her brief but volatile relationship of a dozen years earlier with Grover Cleveland, the Democratic candidate, and she played the rape card.

“While in my room [Grover] accomplished my ruin by the use of force and violence, and without my consent. After he had accomplished his purpose, he told me that he was determined to secure my ruin if it cost him $10,000, or if he was hanged by the neck for it. I then and there told him that I never wanted to see him again, and commanded him to go away, which he did. I never saw him after that until my condition became such that it was necessary for me to send for him, some six weeks later, to inform him of the consequence of his action.” ⁶

Although a potential game-changer if true, Maria’s shocking claim got little traction in 1884, and isn’t even mentioned in most tellings of Grover’s political career.

The Shelf Life of a Scandal

Twenty-five years after the death of President Cleveland in 1908, American historian Allan Nevins wrote a biography of Grover Cleveland. Titled, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage, the book earned Allan a Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in 1933, and although 873-pages in length, just four of those pages dealt with the Maria Halpin episode.

In closing out the story, Allan had this to say:

Had this scandal been brought out during the Chicago convention, it would doubtless have prevented Cleveland’s nomination; had it been brought out in the last fortnight of the campaign, it would doubtless have defeated his election. But, appearing when it did, it soon fell into its proper proportions. It was evident that the real issue was the public integrity and capacity of the two candidates, and that old questions of private conduct were essentially irrelevant.

This view was neatly expressed by one of the Mugwumps: (Republican political activists in the United States who were intensely opposed to political corruption ⁷)

“We are told that Mr. Blaine has been delinquent in office but blameless in private life, while Mr. Cleveland has been a model of official integrity, but culpable in his personal relations. We should therefore elect Mr. Cleveland to the public office which he is so well qualified to fill, and remand Mr. Blaine to the private station which he is admirably fitted to adorn.” ⁸

In the end, and whether despite the scandal or because of it, Grover Cleveland became the 22^ndpresident of the United States, defeating his Republican opponent, James Blaine, across the board — in number of states carried (20 to 18), in electoral votes (219 to 182) and in the popular vote (48.8% to 48.3%).

And, although he lost to Benjamin Harrison in the next presidential election cycle, Grover came back four years later and defeated the incumbent Harrison in one the biggest landslides of the era to become the 24^thpresident.

Oscar’s Odyssey

So what happened to Oscar, the only truly innocent person involved in the scandal?

Sometime around 1876 or so, he was legally adopted by Dr. James Edward King and his wife, Sarah Kendall King. His parents quickly gave him a new name, a family name – James Edward King Jr.

The King family remained in Buffalo, where James SR continue to faithfully serve his community as a physician until his unexpected death from a fall in 1908.

Judge Roswell Burrows said of his friend:

“There is not much public interest in the history of a man who did his life-work so quietly as did Dr. King. He never sought notoriety or public office. He did his duty faithfully and took little part in politics or popular public affairs. He never talked much about himself, and carefully avoided anything which looked like show. If he performed successfully a difficult surgical operation or had a remarkably interesting case of sickness, nothing was ever heard of it in the newspapers. I sometimes thought that he went too far in avoiding praise. He did a great deal of charitable work which will never be known. ⁹

With such a strong role model, it should be no surprise that James JR followed his father’s example and also became a physician.

Here’s a bit about him which accompanied an announcement of his 1931 re-election to the council of the University of Buffalo:

“Dr. King is a graduate of the medical school of the University of Buffalo, Class of 1896, after he passed through the local public and high school system. His graduation as a doctor was followed by an internship, and three periods of post-graduate work in Europe. In 1898, he began teaching such subjects as anatomy, embryology, obstetrics and gynecology. For ten years he has occupied the chair of gynecology in the School of Medicine.

During the same period he has held various hospital positions, at present being the gynecologist-in-chief to Buffalo City Hospital, attending gynecologist to Buffalo General Hospital, and consultant to Buffalo State hospital and the Lafayette General Hospital.” ¹⁰

James never married.

He died in 1947 at the age of 71. In his obituary, he was acknowledged as “one of the foremost women’s specialists in the United States.” Neither Grover Cleveland nor Maria Halpin are mentioned. ¹¹

I don’t know about you, but I find the story of Grover Cleveland fascinating, and a great reminder that American politics has long been a spectacle, if not an outright circus. I’m not sure that’s reassuring tho, what about you?

^{End Notes}

¹ Allen Nevins, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage, New York, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1933, P. 164.

² “A Terrible Tale: The pitiful Story of Maria Halpin and Governor Cleveland’s Son, From Buffalo Evening Telegraph, The Indiana Progress, Indiana, PA, August 21, 1884, P. 2.

³ Committee of Independent Republicans, “The Charges Swept Away. A Political Scandal Speedily Settled. Report of a Committee of Independent Republicans, Dwelling in Buffalo, Concerning Accusations Against Governor Cleveland.,” DeGolyer Library Exhibits, accessed August 4, 2024, https://degolyer.omeka.net/items/show/399.

⁴ Grover Cleveland: His Betrayal if Miss Maria Halpin Under Promise of Marriage, His Inhumane Treatment of the Unfortunate Woman, Oakland Tribune, Oakland, CA, August 8, 1884, p.1.

⁵ “Third edition: Oscar’s Nurse. Another chapter of Maria Halpin’s Sad Story: What Became of Her Baby When it was First Taken from Her”, The Evening Telegraph, Buffalo, NY, October 3, 1884, P. 1.

⁶ Grover Cleveland: His Betrayal if Miss Maria Halpin Under Promise of Marriage, His Inhumane Treatment of the Unfortunate Woman, Oakland Tribune, Oakland, CA, August 8, 1884, p.1.

⁷ Wikipedia

⁸ Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage, New York, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1933, P. 167.

⁹ “Obituary of Dr. James E. King”, Buffalo Courier Express, Buffalo, NY, January 22, 1888, P. 10.

¹⁰ “U.B. Council members Re-elected Three Long prominent in Buffalo”, The Buffalo News, Buffalo, NY, June 24, 1931. P. 21.

¹¹ Obituary of Dr. J.E. King