Stand by your man?
Think the current Republican-Democrat/conservative-liberal divide could be the worst ever in American politics? Think again; things have often been as bitterly partisan, if not worse.
Several years before the 1861 Southern secession young South Carolina Sen. Preston Brooks almost beat a much older Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner to death with a cane while he delivered an anti-slavery speech on the Senate floor. Although he continued in the Senate after a partial recovery from his injuries, Sen. Sumner suffered ill health from the beating for the rest of his days.
Brooks was charged with assault and heavily fined, although he was not expelled from the Senate as he should have been. But pro-slavery sympathizers collected a huge pot of money which paid every cent of Brooks’ considerable fine. And he continued his Senate career a villain to many but a hero to pro-slavery Southerners. On the first anniversary of the attack, Brook’s sympathizers presented him with miniature brass canes in commemoration of his cowardly assault on Sumner. And until after the Civil War, few senators or congressmen would any longer enter the Capital chambers unarmed.
In the bitterly-contested presidential election of 1828 between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, Adams supporters in partisan newspaper accusations called Jackson a murderer for his participation in several duels as a young man, one in which he killed an opponent, and his hanging of several deserters as a commanding general during the War of 1812. They also called Rachel, Jackson’s beloved wife, an outright whore (that’s the actual word they used) because she, through being misinformed, married Jackson before a divorce from her first husband was final. In retaliation Jackson’s supporters accused Adams of pimping women for the Tsar of Russia while as a boy he accompanied his father to Moscow on a diplomatic mission. And these are just samples of the insults and accusations of that especially bitter campaign.
Things became nasty in the 1884 presidential campaign when it became known that Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland, a man of a “squeaky-clean” reputation, had as a young man fathered a child out of wedlock. It made little difference that Cleveland had immediately assumed financial responsibility for the child, including her education. Republican partisans chanted “Ma, ma; where’s my pa?” After the election the Democrats replied “Gone to the White House, haw, haw, haw!”
In the post-Civil War Credit Mobilier scandal a dozen congressmen and Vice President Schuyler Colfax were convicted of soliciting and accepting bribes in a railroad construction kickback deal. And the Teapot Dome affair of the 1920s resulted in Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall’s conviction and a minor Interior Department operative committing suicide. Then there was Watergate and Nixon’s resignation to avoid impeachment and the Iran-Contra affair with Reagan’s initial denial and later sheepish confession. But I think the seemingly continuous corruption we are experiencing today might be the most severe and inclusive ever.
What finally brought Nixon down was the realization and admission by key members of his own party that he was guilty. Judging from the results of the recent impeachment effort it is abundantly clear this isn’t going to happen today. No matter what Trump does or has done, the Republican Party is going to stand behind him. Sad for us as a nation and as a people.
George B. Reed Jr., who lives in Rossville, can be reached by email at reed1600@bellsouth.net.