Presidential compaigns

Presidential campaigns are a lot nicer today than they used to be. What respectable person today would think of calling one of the candidates for the highest office in the land a carbuncled-faced old drunkard? Or a howling atheist? Or a pickpocket, thief, traitor, lecher, syphilitic, gorilla, crook, anarchist, murderer? Yet such charges were regular features of American presidential contests in the 19th century. And high hats as well as lowbrows indulged in the invective.
In 1800 Abigail Adams lamented that the contest between her husband John and Thomas Jefferson that year had exuded enough venom to "ruin and corrupt the minds and morals of the best people in the world." In 1864 Harper's Weekly published a depressingly long list of all the vicious epithets hurled at Abraham Lincoln during his bid for re-election. And in 1884 Lord Bryce, sojourning in the New World, was astonished to find that the Cleveland-Blaine match had come to center on the "copulative habits" of one candidate and the "prevaricative habits" of the other. Bryce was so impressed by the "tempest of invective and calumny which hurtles around the head of a presidential candidate" that he told Britishers they could understand its violence only if they imagined "all the accusations brought against all the 670 seats in the English Parliament" were "concentrated on one man."2 Historian William S. McFeely is right: campaigns in recent years seem prissy by comparison.