a common libertine for their president
Maria Halpin, Grover Cleveland and more
I remember learning about Grover Cleveland in history class. My textbook recorded him as “the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms.” After this week, that textbook will need some updating: Grover Cleveland is now just the first president to serve two non-consecutive terms. Donald Trump will be the second.
But a long-buried sex scandal nearly derailed Cleveland’s first bid for the presidency. In 1884, smack dab in the middle of a heated campaign, The Buffalo Evening Telegraph published a blockbuster investigation, complete with this damning headline: “A Dark Chapter in a Public Man’s History: The Pitiful Story of Maria Halpin and Governor Cleveland’s Son.”
In 1874, when Grover Cleveland worked as an attorney in Buffalo, he frequented 38-year-old Maria Halpin’s boarding house. Cleveland claimed the two became “illicitly acquainted.” Halpin said he pursued her romantically, eventually forcing himself on her and sexually assaulting her. Nine months later, she gave birth to a child. Cleveland quickly had Maria committed to a local mental asylum, and, even though he accepted paternity was likely his, arranged for the infant boy to be put up for adoption.
Subsequent reports from the Cleveland campaign smeared Maria as a drunk with loose morals. Rumors suggested she’d slept with three other men who visited her boarding house — all Cleveland’s friends, of course. But doctors from the mental asylum to which she’d been committed came forward to tell their own versions of events. As one reporter wrote in The Chicago Tribune:
He says she was brought to the asylum without warrant or form of law. When he examined her he found that she was not insane, though she had been drinking. The managers of the asylum had no right to detain her, and she left in a few days — that is, as soon as she chose to after her terrible experience.
Upon her release from the asylum, Maria discovered what had happened to her baby, whom she had named Oscar Folsom Cleveland. She worked with her brother-in-law and another attorney to cobble together a legal case that could hopefully restore her parental rights. She attempted to charge Cleveland with abduction and assault, on the grounds that he “had previously tried less violent means to deprive her of the child and get her out of the way.”
But Maria and Oscar were never reunited. Cleveland fought off any potential charges and paid Maria $500 to leave Buffalo. Oscar went on to live a quiet life, eventually dropping the “Cleveland” surname to instead take that of his adoptive family. Maria remarried and started a new life in New Rochelle, New York — until word reached her that Cleveland was planning a run for the presidency, at which point she went public with her story of “the circumstances under which my ruin was accomplished.”
News of the scandal swept the nation. Editorials debated the details of Maria’s story and questioned Cleveland’s fitness for the presidency. As one preacher wrote in a Buffalo newspaper: “It seems to me that a leading question ought to be: do the American people want a common libertine for their president?” At campaign events, Cleveland’s opponents led crowds in a sing-song chant: “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?”
Ultimately, the scandal and songs didn’t do much to sway voters. Cleveland won the White House and his supporters put their own spin on that notorious chant: “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!” He won back some popularity by announcing his engagement to the glamorous Frances Folsom, a 21-year-old socialite he’d known since birth (the circumstances surrounding this relationship are themselves sordid: Cleveland liked to make jokes about the teenage Frances, saying he stayed single as he was “waiting for his bride to grow up”). The White House wedding took all the spotlight, and Maria Halpin’s name again disappeared.
She died in 1902, requesting a private funeral without reporters, as “she dreaded having strangers look curiously upon her dead face.”
More on 🦅:
President Cleveland’s Problem Child, Smithsonian Magazine
The Life and Presidency of Grover Cleveland, White House History
The Halpin Affair, Wittenberg History Journal
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