Fed up with partisan name-calling? Tired of the low level of debate? Well, cheer up. It's been worse.
By BILL DURYEA
Published May 2, 2004
As the brief and loathsome career of 18th century pamphleteer James Thomson Callender demonstrates, the use of sneering rhetoric, sex scandals and leaked secrets to sway campaigns is as old as the republic.
The recent crush of memoirs and insider looks at the secretive Bush White House gives the impression that we're experiencing an unprecedented era of partisan publishing. If the fury of the president's defenders is any indication, the ranks of new authors have never been so full of disloyal, self-interested, money-grubbing former administration officials.
In The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill calls President Bush "a blind man in a room full of deaf people" and avers that the president was plotting war with Iraq months before 9/11. This is what he gets in return from Stephen Moore in National Review:
"Let us be clear on one thing about Paul O'Neill: He was one of the worst treasury secretaries in memory. During the height of a currency crisis and meltdown in the stock market, O'Neill was playing the role of a rock groupie as he followed Bono around Africa," Moore wrote in January.
Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies, published just in time for his testimony before the 9/11 commission, earned this review from Charles Krauthammer: Clarke is "not just a perjurer but a partisan perjurer. . . ."
"Clarke is clearly an angry man," he continued, "angry that Condoleezza Rice demoted him, angry that he was denied a coveted bureaucratic job by the Bush administration. Angry and unreliable."
And that's the more restrained, thoughtful end of the rhetorical scale. Let's not forget these gloves-off political jabs: Al Franken's "lying liars," Sean Hannity's liberals and other evildoers, Michael Moore's "Bush is a deserter" charge and Ann Coulter's memorable description of Scott Ritter as the "former U.N. arms inspector turned peacenik turned suspected pederast."
Mark Twain said he'd need a "pen warmed up in hell" to express himself satisfactorily. Well, Coulter and the others must keep their keyboards in Satan's microwave.
But vicious as this rock 'em-sock 'em debate may sound, it is nowhere near the low point of our nation's public discourse. For that distinction, you have to travel back about 200 years to a period we tend to think of nostalgically, when Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, the minds that birthed a nation, were at the height of their expressive powers.
Their words have lasted the ages, but some of the writing that was most influential at the time was done by a venomous drunk named James Thomson Callender.
"He would have worked for the National Enquirer," said John M. Belohlavek, professor of history at the University of South Florida.
In an era when books were far too expensive to produce with the rapidity of modern publishing, it was newspapers and pamphlets that carried virtually all the political discourse of the day. And Callender was the most notorious practitioner. During an eight-year period between 1796 and 1803, Callender achieved the rare distinction of eternally besmirching the reputations of both Hamilton and Jefferson, political enemies whose only common ground was their eventual hatred for him.
Here he is savaging President John Adams, a Federalist, in a 1798 pamphlet titled The Prospect Before Us:
"A hideous hermaphroditical character that has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." He concluded by warning, "Take your chance between Adams, war and beggary, and Jefferson, peace and competency."
If it sounds as if Callender was carrying water for Jefferson, the most prominent Republican in the nation, he was. In fact, Jefferson supported Callender with foreign affairs information that would reflect badly on Adams and most importantly with money.
"When Callender sent (Jefferson) proof sheets of the first score or more pages of his new volume, The Prospect Before Us," writes Fawn M. Brodie in Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, "Jefferson wrote, "Such papers cannot fail to produce the best effect. They inform the thinking part of the nation.' "
For bashing Adams, Callender was prosecuted under the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts and served time in a Richmond jail. But despite his sacrifice for his benefactor, his relationship with Jefferson cooled after Jefferson won the presidency in 1800 and declined Callender's request to be appointed postmaster of Richmond. Callender turned on Jefferson with a vengeance that makes Clarke's critique of Bush's terrorism policy look like constructive advice from a close pal.
A possibly apocryphal though highly entertaining story has it that Callender stood outside Jefferson's mansion and when he saw the president in a window shouted, "Sir, you know that by lying I made you president, and I'll be damned if I do not unmake you by telling the truth."
In September 1802, now writing for the brand-new anti-Republican Richmond Recorder, Callender wrote the following:
"It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is TOM. His features are said to bear a striking resemblance to those of the president himself."
Yes, Callender broke the Sally Hemings story and thereby gave birth to a seemingly unending series of scorching political attacks and pornographic ballads about "Sooty Sal."
Jefferson refused to answer the charges publicly, a lesson he had learned watching the aftermath of Callender's revelation in 1796 that Hamilton had had an affair with a woman named Maria Reynolds and may have been involved in a banking scandal. Hamilton admitted the affair and denied the financial wrongdoing, but his career was irreparably damaged.
Callender did not let up. He resurrected a 35-year-old allegation that Jefferson had had an affair with Betsey Walker. Once the rumor was public, her husband John, humiliated as a cuckold, felt obligated to challenge Jefferson, a sitting president, to a duel. Jefferson defused the situation by meeting privately with Walker and promising to restrain the most partisan publications.
It was an odd position for a man who was such a defender of a free press. But then he had done his part to promote the slander when it served his political aims.
* * *
Few people write now with the ad hominem relish of Callender. It would be hard to conceive any modern-day columnist or book author, no matter how partisan, approaching the vileness of Callender imagining the scene inside Monticello:
"Jefferson before the eyes of his two daughters, sent to his kitchen, or perhaps to his pigstye, for this Mahogany coloured charmer."
Matt Drudge's scurrilous assertion that Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal beat his wife comes close. The difference being Drudge later apologized and retracted the story, while Callender's story, shorn of its malevolent embroidery, was later proven true by genetic testing.
Just like Callender's rebound after his imprisonment, Drudge wasn't cowed by Blumenthal's $30-million libel suit (later dropped). Within a few months Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Callender, though unprincipled and mercenary to the core, had plenty of talent as an investigator. He made his stories with shoe leather and leaked documents. The Sally Hemings scoop was the result of interviewing Jefferson's neighbors in Charlottesville.
And of course his sources in government were impeccable, as Jefferson's leaked documents to him prove. Leaks are essential to modern journalism, too. As Yogi Berra might say, the ship of state wouldn't float if they plugged all the leaks.
Last year, someone in the Bush administration, looking to intimidate Joseph Wilson - a former ambassador whose trip to Africa disproved a White House theory about uranium sales to Iraq - leaked the name of Wilson's wife, an undercover CIA agent, to veteran conservative columnist Robert Novak. He published her name, blowing her cover and sparking an investigation into the security breach.
The response to this partisan ploy? You guessed it. Wilson's book hits stores this week. Let the counterpartisan frenzy begin.
* * *
The roots of this partisanship can be traced, says historian Patricia U. Bonomi, to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that ushered in the age of parliamentary rule in England and the attendant reduction of the monarchy's power.
"This was a traumatic moment," Bonomi says, as England, and by extension its colonies in America, entered the age of political parties.
"Political parties were evil," she says. "They didn't have the concept of loyal opposition. It wasn't until well into the 19th century that we came to see political parties as a good thing and a check on power."
Unfettered by royal licensing, the "Grub Street Press" (named for the street in London where the pamphleteers were concentrated) gave free rein to the scandalmongering of the warring factions.
"You could say just about anything you wanted about public officials," Bonomi says. "Sexual deviance of various kinds was a major category of charge placed against these people."
One of the most notorious examples involved Lord Cornbury, the royal governor of New York and New Jersey from 1702-1708. Cornbury's reputation as an administrator was woeful ("possibly the worst governor Britain ever imposed on an American colony," according to one source), but the criticism of him that has endured centuries had nothing to do with his official work.
In 1707, a newspaper published a letter alleging that Cornbury "rarely fails of being dresst in Women's Cloaths every day." Two years later, the charge that he was an unabashed transvestite was reinforced with another published letter:
"My Lord Cornbury has and does still make use of an unfortunate Custom of dressing himself in Womens Cloaths and exposing himself in that Garb upon the Ramparts to the view of the public; in that dress he draws a World of Spectators about him and consequently as many Censures."
Nearly three centuries passed before Bonomi in her 1998 book The Lord Cornbury Scandal was able to debunk the story, which had come to include as evidence a portrait purporting to show Lord Cornbury dressed in a gown. No one knows who the woman in the painting is, but it's not the late governor, Bonomi says.
Turmoil similar to that which defined Cornbury's era was gripping the new United States in the early 19th century. Federalists and Republicans (otherwise known as monarchists and mobocrats in their respective partisan publications) had little confidence that the party out of power was not actively conspiring to undermine the new union.
Even George Washington was not immune.
A British newspaper in March 1783 repeated a charge lodged in an Irish publication that the leader of the American troops was not the father of his country, but rather the mother. The papers relied on an alleged deathbed confession of Washington's wife, Martha. The only problem with that was Mrs. Washington would not die until 1802.
The books that are now getting so much attention are, by comparison, sober discussions of important public policy. But don't let the bestseller list fool you; we haven't lost our taste for a juicy tale.
"You're seeing issues of credibility and character," Belohlavek said. Look at the discussion of Bush's National Guard service, of John Kerry's combat medals. Not to mention the more spurious rumors.
"Was Kerry having an affair?" Belohlavek said. "Likewise, the doctored photos trying to link Kerry and Jane Fonda at the same (antiwar) rally."
It is difficult to predict the power and longevity of a scandal. The Sally Hemings saga has endured to this day (and was substantiated not long ago by genetic testing), but it did not, as Jefferson feared, cost him the election in 1804. Callender didn't last even that long. His body was found floating face down in the James River in July 1803. He was said to have fallen drunk into the 3-foot-deep water and drowned accidentally. Not wanting to accord him any sympathy, one of his fiercest detractors said his drowning was "voluntary . . . putting a miserable end to a miserable life."
- Information from Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, by Fawn M. Brodie, and American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, by Joseph J. Ellis, was used in this article.
