All that campaign corruption: Forget about it until next time
Around the time FBI director James Comey torpedoed the Hillary Clinton campaign and audio emerged of Donald Trump discussing women’s genitalia, I happened upon a fascinating book called Anything for a Vote, about corruption in U.S. presidential campaigns.
Lies, fake news, accusations of insanity, manipulative dark forces, FBI interference — America’s presidential history has been jammed with misbehaviour and malfeasance, and author Joseph Cummins’ summary suggests the 2016 election has merely continued the pattern. There’s nothing like a short history of sleaze to put current disaster into perspective.
Take, for instance, the Connecticut newspaper that wrote of Thomas Jefferson in 1800: “Are you prepared to see your dwellings in flames … female chastity violated, (your) children writhing on the pike?” Or the accusation from enemies of John Quincy Adams that he had once offered his wife’s maid to the Russian czar as a concubine.
One political foe told the House of Representatives in the 1840 campaign that Martin Van Buren had installed nine-foot mirrors in the White House, ate from silver plates with forks of gold and had built on the grounds two hillocks that looked like “an Amazon’s bosom, with a miniature knoll on its apex, to denote a nipple.”
There were accusations of presidential candidates being — God forbid — Catholic, and — here, Hillary Clinton might empathize — frequent attacks on their appearance. Lincoln, for instance, was described in the Houston Telegraph as the “most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a single frame.”
Political machines were churning out fake news long before the eruptions of Trump’s Twitter army. Candidate Samuel Tilden set up a “literary bureau” that spun lie after lie about opponent Rutherford B. Hayes. In the 1880 election, a less subtle initiative, the “New York Truth” newspaper published sweeping falsehoods about James Garfield.
Depending on the election, freed blacks were forced to the ballot box at gunpoint; individuals voted 10 or 20 times; candidates were accused of being mentally ill. In the 1896 contest between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan, medical “experts” concluded Bryan suffered from megalomania and various creative forms of paranoia. Candidates were accused of having “colored” blood; rumours of alcoholism were spread; the KKK took an active hand. Russian hackers have nothing on the 19th century.
And the 20th? FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was collecting what dirt he could on presidential nominees, notably Harry Truman. James Comey, c’mon down.
Adlai Stevenson, meanwhile, was accused of the great evil of his day: being homosexual. And the Kennedy-Nixon contest of 1960 was marred by “widespread evidence of stolen ballot papers, dead men voting and phony registering ” in Texas alone; advantage Kennedy. In Illinois, similar antics carried the state for him.
The Johnson-Goldwater matchup of 1964, meanwhile, lurches right off Cummins’ sleazeo-meter; it’s hard to conclude Clinton-Trump was any worse. And all of this before Watergate.
By the way, if you think Trump isn’t qualified for his new job, consider what one pamphleteer wrote of Andrew Jackson in 1828: “… he is a man of no labour, no patience, no investigation; in short … his whole recommendation is animal fierceness and organic energy. He is wholly unqualified by education, habit and temper for the station of the President.” So there.
Canada hasn’t been exempt from such dirt either, from Macdonald to current times.
Let’s pick, say, 1968. In his book, Trudeaumania, Robert Wright reviews some of the smears lobbed at Pierre Elliott Trudeau. There were claims that the future prime minister was “pro-Soviet, pro-Castro, pro-Mao.” A booklet compared him to Adolf Hitler. There was a whisper campaign that Trudeau’s marital status — single at the time — was linked to homosexuality.
Leap forward a few decades, to the low road of the Progressive Conservative party in 1993, with its TV ads that emphasized Jean Chrétien’s mild facial deformity. Perhaps it inspired Trump to ridicule a disabled reporter.
“A nice, dirty election runs in our blood,” Cummins concludes about America, and as we watch the newest president being sworn it, no one argues. Corruption and democracy, it seems, will continue their tense dance for a long time to come.