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Big hands or tiny, slinging mud has a long history

Michael D. Schaffer is a former book review editor of The Inquirer The politics of insult has a long history in America. No, Donald Trump didn't invent it, although he has taken it to levels not seen for some time.

Marco Rubio made fun of the size of Donald Trump's hands, but at least he never accused the front-runner of pimping for the czar, as John Quincy Adams' opponents did.
Marco Rubio made fun of the size of Donald Trump's hands, but at least he never accused the front-runner of pimping for the czar, as John Quincy Adams' opponents did.Read more

Michael D. Schaffer

is a former book review editor of The Inquirer

The politics of insult has a long history in America. No, Donald Trump didn't invent it, although he has taken it to levels not seen for some time.

Abraham Lincoln was caricatured in 1860 as a homely bumpkin and accused of being a heavy drinker, Grover Cleveland was pilloried in 1884 for fathering an illegitimate child ("Ma, Ma, where's my pa?" the campaign chant went), and John Quincy Adams was accused in 1828 of pimping for the czar.

Campaign rhetoric doesn't come any nastier than the mud slung around in 1800 when John Adams and Thomas Jefferson squared off for the presidency in an election that they were certain would shape the very soul of the new nation.

Adams' Federalist Party blasted Jefferson as an atheist and warned Americans that he would take their Bibles away. One campaign broadside pleaded with every voter to put his hand on his heart (remember, all voters at that time were male) and ask himself: "Shall I continue in allegiance to GOD AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT, or impiously declare for JEFFERSON - AND NO GOD!!!"

The Rev. William Linn, the first chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives, warned in a campaign pamphlet that Jefferson's election would "destroy religion, introduce immorality, and loosen all the bonds of society."

The stuff that Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans hurled at Adams was just as bad. The worst of it came from the hired pen of James T. Callender, a Scottish immigrant who would write anything about anybody. Jefferson, who may never have heard the phrase plausible deniability, but thoroughly grasped the concept, was careful to keep his name away from the attacks on his old friend but knew what Callender was going to publish.

In a series of essays collected under the title The Prospect Before Us, Callender excoriated Adams for petulance, pedantry, and hypocrisy, fuming that Adams had a "hideous, hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman."

For his efforts, Callender was tried and convicted under the Sedition Act, which forbade defaming Congress and the president. He was sentenced to nine months in jail and fined $200. (Callender later turned against Jefferson and in 1802 wrote several articles alleging that Jefferson had fathered children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, a charge that DNA testing in our time would suggest was true.)

Sometimes, campaign smears have been just plain silly: A campaign broadside in 1828 accused Andrew Jackson of being a cannibal. Not so silly were the attacks on his wife, Rachel, who was labeled a bigamist because she and Jackson unwittingly married before her divorce from her first husband was complete. Jackson had been avenging her honor on the dueling ground for years and even killed one man for speaking ill of her, but he was powerless to stop the flood of campaign attacks when he ran against the incumbent, John Quincy Adams, who had defeated him four years earlier.

"Even Mrs. J. is not spared, and my pious mother, nearly fifty years in the tomb, and who, from her cradle to her death had not a speck of scorn upon her character, has been dragged forth . . . and held to public scorn as a prostitute who intermarried with a Negro, and my eldest brother sold as a slave in South Carolina," Jackson lamented.

Jackson won the election but lost Rachel, who died before he could take office. He blamed her death on the stress of the attacks. "May God Almighty forgive her murderers as I know she forgave them," he said. "I never can."

(Given the slur and counterslur of the current political season, it's fortunate that the dueling that Jackson and some of his contemporaries found so necessary has gone out of fashion as a way to settle political disputes. Questioning the size of an opponent's male member or dissing a war hero for having been a POW were slights that could well have ended with pistols at dawn in Jackson's day.)

Jackson aside, most candidates seem content simply to shrug off attacks as part of the game.

Jefferson wrote in an 1800 letter that "from the moment that a portion of my fellow citizens [looked toward me] with a view to one of their highest offices, the floodgates of calumny have been opened upon me. . . . I leave them therefore to the reproof of their own consciences. If these do not condemn them, there will yet come a day when the false witness will meet a judge who has not slept over his slanders."

Franklin D. Roosevelt, running for an unprecedented fourth term in 1944, took the humorous route. "These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons," he said in a campaign speech. "No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them."

Good dog, Fala.

mdschaffer87@verizon.net