Mudslinging, smears, and stolen elections have been with the republic since the founding — and so has the machinery that survives them.
The Secretary of State Hires a Poet
In the summer of 1791, the Secretary of State of the United States hired a poet.
Thomas Jefferson brought Philip Freneau into the State Department as a “clerk for foreign languages” at a salary of $250 a year, despite the inconvenient fact that Freneau’s languages amounted to English and some college French. His real work required neither.
Freneau had been recruited — by Jefferson and James Madison — to edit the National Gazette, a new opposition newspaper whose purpose was to attack the policies of the very administration paying his clerk’s salary. Jefferson gave his editor access to State Department information; Madison contributed roughly eighteen anonymous essays. Alexander Hamilton, the principal target, finally exposed the arrangement in July 1792, writing under a pseudonym of his own: “In common life it is thought ungrateful for a man to bite the hand that puts bread into his mouth; but if the man is hired to do it, the case is altered.”
Hold that scene in your mind, and remember who these men were. Madison had written in Federalist No. 10 that the “violence of faction” was a “dangerous vice” of popular governments. George Washington would soon warn, in his Farewell Address, against “the baneful effects of the spirit of party” and its “spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension.”
Yet within Washington’s first term, the men who issued the warnings had built the machinery: the first opposition party in American history — Jefferson and Madison’s Democratic-Republicans, organized against Hamilton and the Federalists — and, alongside it, a hired attack press financed through a government office.
We hear constantly that our politics has reached some unprecedented low — the tricks, the smears, the shamelessness.
The historical record says otherwise.
Dirty politics is not a corruption that crept into the American system with television or social media. It arrived with the system itself, in the first decade, at the hands of the founders — and it has been endemic to every democratic republic that ever counted votes. That is the bad news. The good news, which we will get to, is what the republic has repeatedly done about it.
1800: The First Nasty Campaign — and the First Fake Quote About It
The Adams–Jefferson rematch of 1800 remains a strong contender for the nastiest campaign in American history, though neither candidate campaigned personally; the mud was thrown by surrogates and a partisan press.
Jefferson secretly financed the pamphleteer James Thomson Callender, whose tract The Prospect Before Us described President Adams as “a hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Jefferson did not write the line, but he paid for it, assuring Callender that such writing “cannot fail to produce the best effect.”
The Federalists gave as good as they got. The Connecticut Courant warned that under a President Jefferson, “murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will 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 paper framed the ballot as a choice between “GOD — AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT” and “JEFFERSON — AND NO GOD.”
Note what happened next, because it supplies the era’s two most instructive footnotes. First, the blowback: when President Jefferson declined to reward Callender with a postmastership, the scandalmonger turned his pen on his patron and in 1802 published the story of Jefferson and Sally Hemings — a story historians dismissed for nearly two centuries until DNA evidence in 1998 substantially corroborated it.
Hired mud, it turns out, does not stay loyal.
Second, the myth: the single most-quoted attack of 1800 — that Adams’s men called Jefferson “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father” — appears in no source from 1800 at all. Monticello’s own research library reports that its earliest known appearance is an 1879 collection of Rhode Island folk tales, yet major news outlets still repeat it as fact.
Even our myths about dirty politics are dirty.
The Nineteenth Century: Coffins, Cabins, and the Blocks of Five
If 1800 set the pattern, 1828 industrialized it.
Philadelphia printer John Binns papered the country with the “coffin handbills” — broadsides bordered in black coffins under the title “An Account of Some of the Bloody Deeds of General Jackson,” recounting militiamen Andrew Jackson had ordered executed. Cincinnati editor Charles Hammond demanded in print: “Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?” — Rachel Jackson’s first divorce, unknown to her, had not been final when she married Andrew. Hammond’s pamphlet went further, declaring Jackson’s mother “a COMMON PROSTITUTE brought to this country by British soldiers.” Jackson’s side answered that John Quincy Adams, while minister to Russia, had procured an American girl for the Tsar. Rachel died weeks after the votes were counted. At her funeral Jackson said, “May God Almighty forgive her murderers … I never can.”
Twelve years later, the Whigs demonstrated that political deception need not involve a smear at all. When a Democratic editorialist sneered that William Henry Harrison would happily retire to a log cabin with a barrel of hard cider and a pension, Whig managers flipped the insult into the most successful image fabrication of the century — selling Harrison, a college-educated son of the Virginia planter aristocracy, as a homespun frontier commoner, complete with log-cabin floats, cider barrels, songs, ribbons, and rallies. Historians widely call 1840 the first modern image campaign. Harrison won 234 electoral votes to 60. The persona beat the biography, and it has been beating biography ever since.
By the 1850s the mud had hardened into blood. Representative Preston Brooks beat Senator Charles Sumner nearly to death at his Senate desk in 1856, and Yale historian Joanne Freeman has documented roughly seventy violent incidents among congressmen in the antebellum decades.
In 1864, two Copperhead journalists at the New York World anonymously published a pamphlet — coining the very word “miscegenation” — that posed as a pro-Lincoln tract advocating racial intermarriage, hoping to inflame voters against the president’s reelection. They even mailed a copy to Lincoln seeking his endorsement; he saw through it and said nothing. Every element of the modern disinformation operation — the false flag, the fabricated document, the attempt to launder it through the target — was fully assembled in 1864, minus only the server farm.
The centennial election of 1876 showed how far procedural hardball could go: Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, disputed returns in three Southern states went to a partisan Electoral Commission that awarded every contested elector to Rutherford B. Hayes by identical 8–7 party-line votes, and the bargain that sealed the outcome ended Reconstruction. In 1884, Republicans chanted “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa?” at Grover Cleveland over an illegitimate child — Cleveland’s instruction to his handlers was to tell the truth — while Democrats recited “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of Maine,” and Blaine’s own surrogate lost him New York, and with it the presidency, by branding the Democrats the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.”
Then came the most instructive scandal of the century.
On October 24, 1888, W. W. Dudley, treasurer of the Republican National Committee, sent Indiana operatives a circular instructing them to divide purchasable “floaters” into “blocks of five” and put a trusted man with the necessary funds in charge of each — written instructions for retail vote-buying.
A curious railroad clerk got a copy into Democratic hands; the New York Herald printed the text. Dudley cried forgery, threatened lawsuits, and was never successfully prosecuted — the warrant was blocked amid credible allegations that the U.S. district attorney had intervened.
But watch what followed. That March, Indiana adopted the Australian ballot — the secret ballot — and by 1892, thirty-five of forty-four states had done the same. The reason your ballot is secret today is that vote-buyers once needed to watch you vote. Reform did not descend from civic virtue; it was scandal’s receipt.
The Twentieth Century: The Smear Goes Electric
In 1934 the smear went to the movies.
When the socialist author Upton Sinclair won the Democratic nomination for governor of California, MGM’s Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg produced faked newsreels — studio actors costumed as menacing hobos, supposedly swarming into California for Sinclair’s promised utopia — and ran them in theaters as news. Historians mark the episode as the birth of the modern media smear campaign: fabricated footage, mass distribution, deniability.
The century also perfected the counter-smear.
On September 23, 1944, Franklin Roosevelt answered the Republican charge that he had sent a destroyer to retrieve his Scottie from the Aleutian Islands: “These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala … his Scotch soul was furious.” The country roared.
Thomas Dewey answered with a slashing reply he later called “the worst damn speech I ever made,” and the Democratic publicity chief reportedly pronounced the race a contest between “Roosevelt’s dog and Dewey’s goat.”
Eight years later to the day, Richard Nixon saved his place on the Eisenhower ticket before an estimated sixty million television viewers by converting a slush-fund accusation into an inventory of his modest life — Pat’s “respectable Republican cloth coat” — and a gift cocker spaniel named Checkers that, “regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep.” In American politics, the defense can be as theatrical as the attack.
The same Nixon supplies the darker chapters. In 1950 he had taken his Senate seat by branding Helen Gahagan Douglas the “Pink Lady,” her record distributed on pink sheets.
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s “Daisy” ad — a little girl’s flower petals dissolving into a nuclear mushroom cloud — aired exactly once as a paid spot and never mentioned Barry Goldwater by name; it didn’t have to.
And in 1972, Nixon’s re-election committee ran a formal dirty-tricks operation whose specialty its own operatives called by a barnyard vulgarity that history books print with asterisks; its signature product, the forged “Canuck letter,” helped wreck the front-running candidacy of Edmund Muskie before a single Watergate burglar was arrested.
The century closed with a confession. Lee Atwater, the strategist who had vowed to make furloughed murderer Willie Horton into Michael Dukakis’s “running mate,” apologized in Life magazine in 1991 as he lay dying of a brain tumor: “I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not. Mostly, I am sorry for the way I thought of other people.” His opposite number was less repentant. “He who doesn’t throw mud,” said Susan Estrich, who managed the Dukakis campaign on the receiving end, “ends up covered in it.”
The Twenty-First Century: Old Mud, New Pipes
Every tactic since has an ancestor.
The 2000 South Carolina push poll — anonymous callers asking Republican primary voters whether they would be “more or less likely” to support John McCain “if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child,” a whisper aimed at his adopted Bangladeshi daughter — was the 1828 whisper campaign with a phone bank.
The 2004 Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry’s war record, funded principally by a single $4.45 million donor and judged by the Annenberg Center’s FactCheck.org to be contradicted by Kerry’s former crewmen and by Navy records, were the coffin handbills with a media buy.
The 2016 operation — Russian military intelligence hacking and leaking Democratic emails while a St. Petersburg troll farm’s content reached, by Facebook’s own Senate testimony, some 126 million Americans — was the 1864 miscegenation hoax with server racks.
The claim of a stolen 2020 election, rejected in more than sixty court cases, rhymed with 1876 — except that in 1877 the loser’s party extracted a bargain, and in 2021 a mob attacked the Capitol.
And in January 2024, New Hampshire primary voters received robocalls in an AI-cloned imitation of the sitting president’s voice telling them not to vote; the consultant behind them drew a six-million-dollar federal fine.
The pipes are new.
The mud is original recipe.
Not an American Disease
Nor is any of this an American invention. The Roman Republic fought electoral corruption so chronically that it maintained an entire legal category for it — ambitus — and legislated against it for over a century, banning the banquets, gladiatorial shows, and hired crowds that candidates used to purchase the electorate.
In 64 BC, Quintus Cicero wrote his brother Marcus a campaign handbook any modern consultant could sign: master flattery, “a disgraceful thing in normal life but essential when you are running for office”; “promise everything to everyone”; and dig diligently into the scandals of your opponents. Eighteenth-century Britain gave us purchased “rotten boroughs,” Hogarth’s paintings of drunken, bought elections, and the 1784 Westminster campaign in which the Tory press accused the Duchess of Devonshire of trading kisses — and worse — for votes.
Wherever citizens have held the power to choose their rulers, someone has found it worthwhile to cheat, smear, and lie for the choosing.
The mud is not in the American character.
It is in the republican form.
Why It Never Goes Away
Madison himself supplied the diagnosis in Federalist No. 10: faction could be cured only by “destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence” — a remedy “worse than the disease.”
Free competition for real power will always produce organized factions, and factions fight with the weapons that work. Modern political science explains why the low road so often works. Winner-take-all elections make politics zero-sum: second place receives nothing, so the marginal smear is cheap and the stakes are total.
Research on the human “negativity bias” — Stuart Soroka’s cross-national studies are the standard reference — shows that we notice, remember, and act on threats far more readily than on promises.
And in his study In Defense of Negativity, political scientist John Geer added the most uncomfortable finding of all: negative ads, because they must make a charge stick, typically contain more verifiable substance — records, votes, specifics — than the gauzy feel-good spots we claim to prefer. Voters do punish attacks they judge uncivil or irrelevant; the backlash effect is real and measurable. But the incentive structure guarantees the supply.
Dirty politics is not a bug in the democratic machine.
It is the exhaust the machine produces whenever it runs.
What Actually Is New — and Where the Real Danger Lies
Honesty requires the other half of the ledger, because “nothing new” is not the same as “nothing to worry about.”
Three things have genuinely changed.
- First, the principals. From 1800 through most of the twentieth century, candidates stayed above the mud while surrogates threw it — Adams and Jefferson never left their farms. Today’s politicians increasingly deliver the insults personally, a norm change with real costs.
- Second, the kernel. The classic smear twisted something true: Cleveland’s child was real, Rachel Jackson’s divorce really was unfinished, Hamilton’s affair was his own published confession. Much modern fabrication — conspiracy theories spun from nothing, deepfaked voices — requires no kernel at all.
- Third, the speed. Harvard’s Jill Lepore, who insists that “the political polarization of today is really nothing new,” argues nonetheless that the automated, algorithmic information environment has produced something without clean precedent: a systematic epistemological crisis — a crisis not of manners but of our shared ability to know what is true.
Where, then, is the line between the mud we survive and the mud that kills?
The political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt locate it in two unwritten norms: mutual toleration — accepting opponents as legitimate rivals rather than enemies of the state — and forbearance, restraint in wielding the raw powers the rules technically allow. Smears, attack ads, even scurrilous lies about a candidate’s parentage are ordinary hardball; republics have digested them for centuries.
What republics do not reliably survive is the other thing: treating the opposition as illegitimate and turning the machinery of elections itself into a weapon. That is why 1876 and 2020 belong in a different category from 1884 and 1988 — and why Joanne Freeman, our finest historian of founding-era political combat, refuses both complacency and panic. There have been moments much like the present, she observes — the 1790s, the 1850s, the 1960s — and we are certainly in an extreme moment now.
The Receipt
Which brings us to the pattern that ought to close every honest history of American dirty politics, because it is the hopeful one.
Again and again, the dirt has produced its own antidote — not through the repentance of the dirty, but through exposure and the reforms that exposure makes possible. The chaos of 1800 gave us the Twelfth Amendment. The blocks of five gave us the secret ballot. Thomas Nast’s cartoons and the New York Times’s ledgers brought down Boss Tweed and fed the civil-service reforms that dismantled the spoils system. Watergate produced the modern campaign-finance regime, the Presidential Records Act, and judicial oversight of surveillance.
The reforms are always partial, often eroded, sometimes reversed. But the sequence — dirt, exposure, reckoning, repair — is the oldest constructive pattern in our politics, and it has one absolute requirement: citizens, journalists, judges, and honest election officials willing to drag the thing into the light and raise its price.
So: dirty politics? Nothing new.
It came over on the same boat as the Constitution, it flourished in Rome before Christ, and it will be operating vigorously in the next election you vote in. The republic has never once been saved by clean politics, because it has never once had clean politics.
It has been saved, every time, by the same unglamorous machinery:
- a free press doing its job,
- courts that will not be bullied,
- officials who count honestly, and
- voters who refuse to shrug.
The mud is permanent. So, it turns out, is the mop — but only if each generation picks it up.
* * * * *
About the Author
Charles C. Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served during the Cold War aboard the nuclear submarine USS Ray (SSN 653), where his tactical innovations helped inspire Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character. He developed the Field Studies methodology to teach “Critical Skills” and was endorsed by the Department of Labor in 1994. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts three podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog and Civic Sage platforms on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, co-host the Chicago Salons at Water Tower Residences.
Sources and Further Reading
Books
Boller, Paul F., Jr. Presidential Campaigns: From George Washington to George W. Bush. Oxford University Press, 2004.
Buell, Emmett H., Jr., and Lee Sigelman. Attack Politics: Negativity in Presidential Campaigns Since 1960. University Press of Kansas, 2008.
Cicero, Quintus Tullius. How to Win an Election: An Ancient Guide for Modern Politicians. Translated by Philip Freeman. Princeton University Press, 2012.
Cummins, Joseph. Anything for a Vote: Dirty Tricks, Cheap Shots, and October Surprises in U.S. Presidential Campaigns. Quirk Books, updated edition, 2015. penguinrandomhouse.com
Felknor, Bruce L. Dirty Politics. W. W. Norton, 1966.
Ferling, John. Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800. Oxford University Press, 2004.
Freeman, Joanne B. Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. Yale University Press, 2001.
Freeman, Joanne B. The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.
Geer, John G. In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns. University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Hasen, Richard L. Cheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons Our Politics — and How to Cure It. Yale University Press, 2022.
Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy. Oxford University Press, 1992. global.oup.com
Larson, Edward J. A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign. Free Press, 2007.
Lepore, Jill. These Truths: A History of the United States. W. W. Norton, 2018.
Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Crown, 2018.
Mark, David. Going Dirty: The Art of Negative Campaigning. Rowman & Littlefield, updated edition, 2009. books.google.com
Pasley, Jeffrey L. The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic. University Press of Virginia, 2001.
Soroka, Stuart N. Negativity in Democratic Politics: Causes and Consequences. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Swint, Kerwin C. Mudslingers: The Top 25 Negative Political Campaigns of All Time. Praeger, 2006. digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu
Articles, Archives, and Primary Sources
“Atwater Apologizes for ’88 Remark About Dukakis.” Associated Press, via The Washington Post, January 13, 1991. washingtonpost.com
Boissoneault, Lorraine. “Rachel Jackson, the Scandalous Divorcee Who Almost Became First Lady.” Smithsonian Magazine, June 15, 2017. smithsonianmag.com
Kamarck, Elaine. “Has a Presidential Election Ever Been as Negative as This One?” Brookings Institution, October 21, 2016. brookings.edu
Nixon, Richard. “Checkers” speech, September 23, 1952. Transcript at the Miller Center, University of Virginia, sourced from the National Archives.
“Son of a Half-Breed Indian Squaw (Quotation).” Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, Monticello / Thomas Jefferson Foundation. monticello.org
Sparrow, Paul. “Defending Fala — A Lesson in Effective Campaigning.” Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum blog, National Archives, September 23, 2015. fdr.blogs.archives.gov
“When Politics Was Really Ugly.” The Washington Post, September 11, 1996. washingtonpost.com
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