Rose and Evangeline

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. A few years after the bishop died in 1901, Evangeline and Rose were together again.  They settled down together in Bagni di Lucca, Tuscany, where they worked together 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 once 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.”