(Host) Commentator Willem Lange is a writer and storyteller who
maintains that the political mud-slinging of campaigns today is a direct
descendent of the campaign rhetoric of yesterday.
(Lange)
Few of us remember the Presidential campaign featuring this jingle: "Ma,
Ma, where’s my pa? He’s gone to the White House, ha ha ha!" The
candidate’s opponents chanted the first half, referring to Grover
Cleveland’s fathering an illegitimate child; his supporters, especially
after his election, gleefully responded with the second half. Paternity
was never established; but Cleveland accepted the responsibility
because, as he said, he was the only bachelor among the possible
respondents. He was elected partly because of his forthrightness in the
matter.
Many past campaigns make the current candidates seem
like medieval Italian buffones beating each other with inflated pig
bladders. Those who fear that corporate campaign donations and a lower
level of rhetoric are ruining democracy may be right; but you can’t
prove it by the higher tone of past campaigns. Most have been fairly
brutal.
During the Red Scare of the ‘50s, Richard Nixon ran for a
California Senate seat against Helen Gahagan Douglas. In his speeches,
he fed Americans’ deep fears about Communism, calling Ms. Douglas "pink
down to her underwear." He won the race, and started down the dark path
that ended with his disgrace 23 years later.
Andrew Jackson,
hero of the Battle of New Orleans, ran against the patrician John Quincy
Adams in 1828. Adams and his people tarred Jackson as an uneducated
bumpkin and poor speller, married to a woman whose previous union had
ended in a murky divorce. Rachel Jackson was reviled as a "convicted
adulteress" and "black wench." The slanderous attacks on both Jackson
and his wife were probably the worst in the history of campaigns.
Shopping for her Inaugural gown, she dropped dead at sixty-one.
Among
other things. Abe Lincoln was called "that grinning ape in the White
House"; and Stephen Douglas described him as "a horrid-looking wretch,
sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the
horse-swapper, and the nightman."
I often wonder how some
candidates can sleep at night after looking into those adoring faces at
rallies and throwing them rubbish to chew on.
But they’re pikers
compared to George Smathers of Florida, who in a 1950 contest allegedly
accused his opponent of being a "known extrovert" whose sister was "a
thespian who sometimes performed her act in public." He’d practiced
"nepotism" with his sister-in-law, had once "matriculated with young
women in college," and before his marriage was a "practicing celibate."
I’ll tell you: sometimes – not often, but sometimes – I do miss the good old days!
This is Willem Lange in Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.