Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, by Mark Wahlgren Summers. All rights reserved. Blaine was accused of every roguery from shaking down a railroad to guano speculations. Cleveland was exposed as the father of one Maria Halpin's illegitimate child. In the end, New York decided all.
Historians touch at their peril any election so captivating.
Perhaps this is why most scholars have given 1884 no more than a glance, often leering. Some modern accounts do the campaign justice, certainly, the best being H. Wayne Morgan's fifty-page narrative and Geoffrey Blodgett's essays about Cleveland and Mugwumpery. Politicking was not done for public entertainment but to tear away or confirm votes that seemed in doubt. Until the end of the 1880s, as one partisan put it, Iowa would go Democratic the day Hell went Methodist. Across the country, the press heralded the news of revolutions no less plausible for the fact that the revolutionaries, at the critical moment, forgot to show up.