It was, most people agreed, a fatal scandal for a presidential campaign. The only mystery seemed to be how the candidate had kept this skeleton crammed in his closet for so long. Oblique talk of “woman trouble” had swirled in his wake for a while.
But in July 1884, American newspapers finally reported that Grover Cleveland, Democratic nominee for president, had secretly fathered a child out of wedlock. As historian H. Wayne Morgan noted, this was a terrible scandal by the standards of polite 19th-century society. Most observers assumed it to be politically un-survivable.
Cleveland would, of course, defy those predictions. And if there is an enduring “moral” of his unlikely recovery from an unprecedented crisis (the first genuine sex scandal of a presidential campaign) it is this: there are fewer irrecoverable scandals in American politics than many would prefer to think.
Read Full Article »
