Rose and Evangeline
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| Rose Elizabeth Cleveland |
In 2007, I published an essay in
the New England Review about Rose
Elizabeth Cleveland, the sister of President Grover Cleveland, who served as
her bachelor brother’s First Lady until his White House marriage. I’ve been
thinking about Rose Cleveland again recently as Minnesota prepares to vote on a
constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages. Rose Cleveland, who was a
scholar, essayist, poet, and novelist, never married, but she ended her life in
a committed relationship with another woman: the widow of Bishop Henry Whipple
of Faribault.
Rose Cleveland and Evangeline
Simpson seem to have met in Florida in the winter of 1889-1890, and later exchanged a series of
passionate love letters, which are preserved in the Minnesota Historical
Society.
“My Eve looks into my eyes with
brief bright glances,” Rose wrote to Evangeline, “with long rapturous
embraces,—when her sweet life beneath and her warm enfolding arms appease my
hunger, and quiet my soul and carry my body to the summit of joy, the end of
search, the goal of love.”
The exchange of love letters came
to an end in 1896, when the thirty-six year old Evangeline Simpson married the
seventy-four year old Bishop Whipple. But this was not the end of the story. The
bishop died in 1901, and a few years later, Evangeline and Rose were together
again. They settled down together
in Bagni di Lucca, Tuscany, where they worked in a military hospital
during World War I, where Evangeline wrote a book about Tuscany, and where they
are buried together in the same crypt in the Protestant cemetery.
The story of Evangeline and
Rose remained hidden for half a century after Evangeline’s death. Finally, in the late 1970s, an
anonymous note arrived at the offices of the American Library Association’s
Task Force on Gay Liberation. The
note, which was passed along to historian Jonathan Katz, explained that in the
collections of the Minnesota Historical Society there was a binder of love
letters that “revealed a lesbian relationship” between Rose Elizabeth Cleveland
and Evangeline Whipple. The letters were not listed in the card catalogue. According to researcher Judith Schwarz,
the Minnesota Historical Society “listed the Whipple-Scandrett Papers as
comprising only nine boxes. The
love letters were in an unlisted, unmarked tenth manuscript box.”
In response to Katz’s
inquiry, the historical society reviewed its policies and decided to list the
letters in its catalogue. In 1989,
Katz published a feature article on Rose and Evangeline in the national LGBT
news magazine, The Advocate.
In the summer of 2003, the
74th General Convention of the Episcopal Church met in
Minnesota. In the convention’s
exhibit hall, there was a display about Minnesota’s first Episcopal bishop,
Henry B. Whipple. The exhibit,
according to press materials, “included probably the first openly-public
mention of a same-sex relationship from another century: that of Bishop
Whipple’s widow, Evangeline, and Rose Cleveland, the sister of U.S. President
Grover Cleveland.” The main order of business at the convention that year was
the confirmation of Rev. V. Gene Robinson, of New Hampshire, as the first
openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church.
“The humanity of each of us,” Rose
Cleveland wrote, “is like some Aeolian harp constructed by the Master Musician
and laid down tenderly by Him upon the sea-shore where winds from every quarter
play continuously. An enlightened
Christianity would leave it, free and sensitive, upon the shore—would open it
to all the winds that hurry to and fro, that it may give out to heaven and
earth its full completed harmony.”
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