Bringing Down the Colonel by Patricia Miller

He takes his glass of beer when he’s thirsty, but I guess he keeps his head about him all the time.” A letter published July 29 from an anonymous Republican lawyer claimed he “never saw him drunk,” and that Cleveland was never “distinguished in this city for licentiousness or debauchery.” Lewis Falley Allen echoed when asked if he knew his nephew to be drunk.

Prominent men rushed to Cleveland’s defense. The most striking allegation staked that Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock with a Buffalo widow named Maria Halpin and used his authority to have her committed to an insane asylum and the child taken out of her custody. The letter, written by Reverend George Ball, portrayed Cleveland as a “beastly drunk” who had “habitual immoralities with women.” It contained dark descriptions of blood-soaked naked bar fights and all-night Sunday liquor parties where Cleveland and his friends called for lewd women. Cleveland was well known Buffalo for his meteoric climb from prominent lawyer to sheriff to mayor before winning the governorship of New York. On July 21 of that year, the Buffalo Evening Telegraph ran a letter detailing alleged improprieties of its favorite adopted son. The election of 1884 between Cleveland, then governor of New York, and Secretary of State James Blaine was prone to the muckraking typical of any political contest. When she did come forward in 1884, it was only to straighten out the stories printed about her and her assailant, Grover Cleveland, as he was campaigning to be president of the United States. Written by Tyler Bagwell Maria Halpin didn’t report because her assailant was the sheriff and he told her “he was determined to secure ruin if it cost him $10,000, or if he was hanged by the neck for it.” Also, it was 1873, and laws protecting women against sexual assault were nonexistent.

Bringing Down the Colonel by Patricia Miller