Maria Crofts Cleveland

Historical Oracle Quora·

What is the single most immoral thing proven to be done by a U.S. president?

That would no doubt be the treatment of Maria Halpin by Grover Cleveland. He raped her and then used his political connections to cover it up. Sound familiar?

“On the evening of Dec. 15, 1873, Halpin, an attractive 38-year-old sales clerk working at a department store in Buffalo, New York, was on her way to a friend's birthday party when she ran into Cleveland strolling down Swan Street. Cleveland was a chunky 37-year-old bachelor whose six-foot frame projected a figure of might and vitality. He had been courting Halpin for several months and they exchanged greetings. Cleveland invited her to dinner at the Ocean Dining Hall & Oyster House. He was pretty "persistent" about it, Halpin would later recall.”

“Their meal together was a pleasant one. Cleveland escorted Halpin back to her room at a downtown boarding house. What happened next, according to Halpin's affidavit, would in another era be classified as date rape. Cleveland sexually assaulted her "[b]y use of force and violence and without my consent," Halpin reported, adding that when she threatened to notify the authorities, Cleveland "told me he was determined to ruin me if it cost him $10,000, 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 leave my room, which he did."

“Six weeks later, Maria became aware that she was pregnant.”

“The boy was born on September 14, 1874, in a hospital for unwed mothers in Buffalo. He was named Oscar Folsom Cleveland, after Cleveland's best friend (Cleveland would later marry Folsom's daughter despite a 27-year difference in age, and she became America's youngest first lady. But that's another story.)”

“What happened to Maria Halpin next was a cruel injustice straight out of a Charles Dickens novel. Cleveland arranged to have the child forcibly removed from his mother and placed in the Buffalo Orphan Asylum. Maria Halpin was thrown into the Providence Lunatic Asylum, although the facility's medical director quickly released her after an evaluation, concluding (correctly) that she was not insane and that her incarceration was the result of an abuse of power by political elites.”

“Cleveland won election as mayor of Buffalo on a clean-government platform in 1881. A year later, he became governor of New York. As "Grover the Good," he won the Democratic nomination for president in 1884. Once he was named to the national ticket, it didn't take long for the media to expose the existence of his illegitimate son. What followed next was a malicious smear campaign: Cleveland's people got the word out that Halpin was a sexual plaything who drank to excess and was intimate with at least three (and possibly four) married men, all of them cronies of Cleveland. Cleveland, it was said, took responsibility for the child's conception because he was the only bachelor among Maria Halpin's gentlemen callers. Cleveland saw the matter through in the most "courageous way," the PR spin went, explaining that his indifference to the boy was due to "doubts about his fatherhood."

“Utter nonsense. My research has established that this time-honored version of the Cleveland scandal is fundamentally dishonest—almost entirely a fairy tale. Maria Halpin was no harlot. She was a widow with two young children, a church-going woman held in high esteem by all who knew her. From everything I could discover about her life, she was what in the 19th century would be termed a chaste woman.”

“Maria Halpin died in 1902 at age 66, with $200 to her name, forever linked to scandal and shame. On her deathbed she reportedly said, "Do not let the funeral be too public. I do not want strangers to come and gaze upon my face. Let everything be very quiet. Let me rest."

Grover Cleveland's Sex Scandal: The Most Despicable in American Political History

Submitted to Geni by Janet Milburn 12/28/20