New in PJ Media:
2024 is shaping up to be one of the hotly contested presidential elections in history, but we have been here before, even way back at the beginning of our embattled republic. The 1800 campaign was hotly contested and stands out as notably acrimonious even now from the vantage point of two hundred more years of acrimonious campaigns.
In those days, the candidates themselves did not campaign, but others more than took up the slack. According to Rating America’s Presidents, the Federalist Hartford Courant sounded the alarm about the consequences of electing the deist Jefferson president: “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will all be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes.” A Federalist leaflet invoked the bloody excesses of the French Revolution: “Can serious and reflecting men look about them and doubt that if Jefferson is elected, and the Jacobins get into authority, that those morals which protect our lives from the knife of the assassin—which guard the chastity of our wives and daughters from seduction and violence—defend our property from plunder and devastation, and shield our religion from contempt and profanation, will not be trampled upon and exploded?”
Jefferson’s supporters gave this right back, calling Adams’s presidency “one continued tempest of malignant passions.” They claimed that he planned to marry off one of his sons to a daughter of British King George III and start an American monarchy. That was one of the milder charges; Adams’s wife Abigail lamented that during the 1800 campaign, enough “abuse and scandal” was published “to ruin and corrupt the minds and morals of the best people in the world.”
One thing that neither Jefferson nor Adams did, however, was to use the machinery of the state to persecute the other and try to frame him for crimes.
Fast-forward to the run-up to the election of 1920. On Jan. 6, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson received news that former President Theodore Roosevelt had died unexpectedly at his home in Oyster Bay, New York, at the age of 60. Upon receiving the news, Wilson’s face broke into a wide, unashamed grin. He was planning to run for a third term in 1920, and the widely popular Roosevelt looked to be his chief rival. World War I had just ended, and Wilson’s ambitious plans for the postwar world, with their centerpiece a new international organization that would preserve world peace, the League of Nations, were on the line. Now, with Roosevelt dead, Wilson’s chances for 1920 were substantially improved. It was a cause for celebration.
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