The Obama and McCain camps can't match the political mudslingers of yesteryear, writes Libby Copelandin Washington
YOU WANT to talk dirty politics? Oh, we'll talk dirty.
We'll talk about . . . 1800! Thomas Jefferson was attacked by religious ministers for being an "infidel" and an "unbeliever". A Federalist cartoon depicted him as a drunken anarchist, and the president of Yale warned that if Jefferson came to power, "we may see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution".
A Connecticut newspaper warned that his election would mean "murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practised" - though the paper (now the Hartford Courant) did apologise. In 1993. "You turned out to be a good influence on America," the editors wrote.
John Adams, the sitting president in 1800, also got hit with his share of slung mud. James Callender, a journalist in league with Jefferson, told the country that Adams was a rageful, lying, warmongering fellow, a "repulsive pedant" and "gross hypocrite" who behaved neither like a man nor like a woman, but instead possessed a "hideous hermaphroditical character". There was also a nasty rumour that Adams had sent his vice-president to Europe to bring back four mistresses, two for each of them.
Anyone disgusted by the tone of modern political campaigns might be reassured (or depressed) to learn that presidential campaigns have long been filled with vitriol and deception.
"Everybody always assumes there was a golden age of presidential campaigning that occurred 20 years ago," says Gil Troy, an American history scholar at McGill University. "Almost from the start, American politics had its two sides - it had its Sunday morning high church sermon side, and it had its Saturday night rough-and-tumble ugly side."
John McCain's wife has accused Barack Obama of conducting "the dirtiest campaign in American history," while Obama aide Robert Gibbs has said: "If people want to get down in the mud, we're prepared to get dirty."
But will anybody achieve the great lows of the 19th century?
The years "1800 and 1828 and the one against Lincoln, I think - those were worse than anything we've had," says historian Paul Boller, who at 91, takes the long view of things.
Political rhetoric was once, as David Mark puts it in "Going Dirty," "shriller, hyperbolic, and downright mean". It was racist (candidates were rumoured to be half-this or part-that), hostile to certain religions, deeply personal and occasionally bizarre. Historians differ on whether Jefferson was ridiculed for being raised on a diet of "hoe-cake" and "fricasseed bullfrog".
A Pennsylvania congressman accused president Martin Van Buren of being so decadent that he landscaped the White House grounds into hills resembling "an Amazon's bosom."
As historian Kathleen Hall Jamieson writes in Packaging the Presidency, the founding fathers intended the nascent nation's elections to be a dignified, deliberative activity, carried out by a small number of wealthy, well-educated men. "The ideal unravelled rapidly." Vitriolic handbills and fiercely partisan newspapers took up one side or another. Laws about who could vote opened up the franchise - somewhat, at least. Party identification was strong. Political feelings were expressed in the strong language of the time, and even people we think of now as above politics were not spared.
To wit: George Washington. "If ever a nation was debauched by a man, the American nation has been debauched by Washington," Benjamin Franklin's grandson wrote in 1796.
According to an 1864 edition of Harper's Weekly, Abe Lincoln was disparaged as a "Filthy Story-Teller," a "Buffoon," a "Usurper", a "Monster" and a "Land-Pirate." His enemies described him as "A Long, Lean, Lank, Lantern-Jawed, High Cheeked-Boned Spavined Rail-Splitting Stallion" .
In the 1828 election, Jamieson writes, Andrew Jackson's supporters distributed handbills portraying John Quincy Adams as driving away a "crippled old soldier" who asked for charity, with a horsewhip, no less.
Adams's supporters put out handbills decrying Jackson's reputation as a military hero by painting the general's execution of six deserting soldiers as a bloodthirsty act.
Jackson's supporters replied with handbills suggesting that Jackson had not executed the soldiers but "swallowed them whole, coffins and all, without the slightest attempt at mastication!!!!!!".
In 1835, Davy Crockett, who briefly considered a run for the presidency, released a campaign tract that noted Martin Van Buren's baldness, described his face as "a good deal shrivelled," compared Van Buren to "dung" and described his personality as "secret, sly, selfish, cold, calculating".
Then he got nasty. Van Buren, he wrote, was "a dandy. When he enters the Senate chamber in the morning, he struts and swaggers like a crow in the gutter. He is laced up in corsets, such as women in a town wear, and, if possible, tighter than the best of them."
In 1858, as Senate candidates Abe Lincoln and Stephen Douglas argued, their remarks about each other were thick with sarcasm.
The crowd loved it. Douglas allowed that Lincoln had some good points - as a young man, Lincoln had been top-notch at "running a foot-race" and "could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town together". Lincoln responded by correcting the assertions of "Judge Douglas" on several matters, allowing that he was certain Douglas wasn't "intending" to lie. He said: "I know the judge is a great man, while I am only a small man" - and then proceeded to gut him.
He also compared Douglas to an "obstinate animal," adding, "I mean no disrespect."
- (LA Times-Washington Post service)