GROVER CLEVELAND FOR PRESIDENT

He invited any citizen to visit his office, at any business hour, and stand as a spectator to any transaction or meeting. As favor-seeking party functionaries approached the governor for jobs or contracts, they glanced dubiously at the assemblage of witness-citizens congregating a few feet away from the governor's desk. Sometimes, these supplicants would whisper their requests into the governor's ear, like this. And the governor would narrow his eyes and answer like this: AND SIR, WHAT SPECIAL QUALIFICATIONS HAVE YOU FOR THIS JOB OTHER THAN YOUR POLITICAL CONNECTIONS? The cringing wretch would slink away.

Cleveland quickly made himself the enemy of virtually every entrenched, business-as-usual politician in the state, including New York City's mighty Tammany Hall machine. Time and again he would take recklessly unpopular positions because he thought them right, even if politically suicidal. Once, he vetoed a bill that would have punished avaricious monopolists by forcing them to lower all New York City railroad fares to a nickel. What sane politician could oppose such a bill? Cleveland despised the profiteers, but felt the measure was contractually unsupportable, an illegal exercise of government authority over private business. It offended his sense of justice. (In time, even his political opponents conceded he was right.)

Cleveland was an unlikely looking reformer. He resembled Boss Tweed, carrying 280 pasty pounds on a small, beleaguered frame. Even by the standards of the day -- in which heft in a politician was said to be a sign of substance and prosperity -- he was considered porcine. His suits were like tarpaulins, and still they strained at the buttons, which would sometimes pop. He worked endless hours, terrifying friends and colleagues who worried for his health. His eyes lay deep in his head. He carried himself with ponderous dignity, and seemed to feel his only talent was in diligence and discipline. When his name was proposed for the presidency, he was said to have reacted with some alarm, wondering what had become of the country if no one available was more suitable than he.

No election before or since was quite like the election of 1884. None so crystallized a nation's moral choices; it was a referendum on misconduct. The Republican candidate, Sen. James G. Blaine of Maine, was a typical politician of the era, a man who had long and voraciously snuffled at the public trough. While speaker of the House, he had helped a railroad obtain lands it wanted, then entered a secret deal with the company granting him handsome commissions from the sale of its bonds. He once wrote an incriminating letter to a railroad official, concluding: "Burn this." The recipient didn't, to Blaine's eternal chagrin.

His opponent, Cleveland, was a man of irreproachable public integrity, but of suddenly suspect personal morals.

Not much was known about Cleveland's former paramour, Maria Halpin, except that she was a tall 36-year-old widow who "spoke French," an apparently racy detail that was repeated often. In fact, she had been a woman of saucy temperament who had dispensed her favors to many of the young lawyers of Buffalo, including GroverCleveland.

Cleveland did not know for sure that he was the father of her child; there were several likely candidates. But because he was the only one of them who was unmarried, he accepted paternity. Intriguingly, the child was named Oscar Folsom Cleveland. Oscar Folsom was Cleveland's law partner.

After the mother had descended into alcoholism and abused her son through neglect, Cleveland had indeed ordered her into an asylum, and sent the boy, briefly, to an orphanage. But Cleveland had paid for the lad's upkeep, and then arranged for and financed his adoption by a respectable wealthy couple. At that, with some justification, he had considered his responsibilities discharged.

But now the whole thing had blown up in his face. One of Cleveland's supporters saw a graceful way out of the shameful mess, a method by which the candidate could put it behind him and simultaneously turn himself into a hero. The man wanted the governor to blame the birth on Folsom: Cleveland should deny that he had ever misbehaved with the widow Halpin, and say he had been honorably protecting a friend's marriage. No harm would be done; Oscar Folsom was no longer alive.

Cleveland was appalled.

"Do you think," he wrote indignantly to a colleague, "that I would permit my dead friend's memory to suffer for my sake?" Instead, he fessed up, accepting more responsibility than many believe was warranted.

What followed was one of the dirtiest campaigns in history. Blaine was denounced as a liar and a thief. Cleveland fared worse. He was ridiculed in print, in newspaper cartoons, on the streets. At Republican rallies, men pushed baby carriages with dolls inside, chanting, in falsetto, "Ma, ma, where's my pa?"