Episode 464: An Appeal to Decency
Salacious Grover Cleveland Details Are But One Paragraph Away!
But First, thank you to everybody who donated to our campaign for Mrs. Jervis's art class, and particularly to the generous donations from the gentlemen Bittner, Starkis, and Graebner. We raised $160, which is a good deal on the way to the classroom's needs. Also, I need to thank Xander Kent and Sam Hock at Jack and Voytek and Elle Skinner at The Littlest Elle for their support and boosterism during the whole drive - they are truly, just wonderful people.
Now, of our trio of Middlin Presidents, two of them are hard to find any full books about beyond numbered volumes in a series of presidential biographies with names like "Volume 23: Benjamin Harrison: The Life of a Man Elected President Once." For Hayes, there is Roy Morris's book on the 1876 election, and some older volumes on his soldiering, but otherwise, again, not too much.
Not so Cleveland. First, his role as an early fighter of government corruption, and its impact on Theodore Roosevelt, is something important enough to the big picture that it will never stop getting written about. And then there's the Other Thing. That being the drama surrounding Oscar Folsom Cleveland, who might or might not have been Cleveland's illegitimate child (Cleveland was never sure one way or the other), and whose mother either was legitimately a raving alcoholic or was stuffed unfairly into an insane asylum by Cleveland's handlers to keep her quiet, depending on who you ask. There's a whole book about JUST THIS by Charles Lachman, which oversteps evidence in favor of titillation from time to time and, heck, that can be fun too.
- Count Dolby von Luckner
