Posted by
Jim Knowlton on Friday, November 09, 2007 7:07:55 PM
Just heard about Joseph Cummins’ new book,
Anything for a Vote, about the history of, shall we say, strenuous campaigning…it’s hilarious and enlightening. Here are some snippets:
- 1836: Congressman Davy Crockett accuses candidate Martin Van Buren of secretly wearing women’s clothing: “He is laced up in corsets!”
- 1912: Theodore Roosevelt is shot in the chest while preparing to give a campaign speech, then proceeds to deliver it anyway: “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose!”
- 1960: Former president Harry Truman advises voters that “if you vote for Richard Nixon, you ought to go to hell!”
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- And this tibdit about the election in 1800 between Jefferson and Adams…
The Federalists couldn’t get enough of attacking Jefferson in a very, very personal way—their assaults sound like the insults leveled at Bill Clinton, another Southerner, almost 200 years later. “Jefferson is a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia Mulatto father,” said one leaflet. A Connecticut paper raised the specter of the French Revolution, supposedly beloved by Jefferson: “Are you prepared to see your dwellings in flames … female chastity violated, [your] children writhing on the pike? GREAT GOD OF COMPASSION AND JUSTICE, SHIELD MY COUNTRY FROM DESTRUCTION!”