You want to talk dirty politics? Oh, we’ll talk dirty. We’ll talk about. 1800!Thomas Jefferson was attacked by ministers who accused him of 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 practiced” — though the paper (now the Hartford Courant) did apologise some years later.In 1993. “You turned out to be a good influence on America,” the editors wrote. Whoops! Never mind.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 rumor that Adams had sent his veep 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.”Will anybody achieve the great lows of the 19th century, though?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 has written about the history of dirty politics and 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 rumored 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.”Oh, “John Quincy Adams was accused of pimping for the czar,” Troy says. Really. The czar of Russia. The press backing Jackson labeled Adams “The Pimp.”
