Lies, Curses and Bastardies

If words were to be taken at their face value last week, a lot of them had dirty faces. The lie was freely passed; the retort discourteous was the rule. Slanderous accusations splattered like eggs. If any citizen could be found last week who believed half of what he heard, he must have been sad indeed. Whichever candidate was elected--if he were to believe his ears--the country was lost.

According to Republicans, an irresponsible New Deal, filled with treachery, fostered by corrupt bosses, was making hash of the defense program, dragging the country into war, bankruptcy, dictatorship. According to Democrats, Republicans recklessly and deliberately falsified the record, and Willkie was an evasive trickster, under the thumb of the most corrupting influence in U. S. politics today, the utilities. Examples of extreme partisan bitterness:

Cartoonist Percy Crosby ("Skippy"): "The only time I ever shall bend a knee to a third-term impostor will be before a firing squad."

Fiorello H. LaGuardia: "... A shameful campaign for a shameless candidate..... There may be such a thing as a . . decent utility man, but I have never met him. . . . Some men have their hair mussed because their brains are working, others because the photographers are working."

Gene Tunney: ". . . I'd rather go down to hell with Wendell Willkie than to the White House with Roosevelt."

Dorothy Thompson: "When you vote for Willkie . . . you are voting for Communism."

Thomas E. Dewey: "[The third-term movement] was conceived in secrecy, nourished on cynicism and reared in arrogance to its ugly maturity by the most corrupt elements of American political life."

But the aspersions of 1940 were not so bad compared to those of past political campaigns. Even the missiles flung at Republican Candidate Willkie gave the 1940 campaign little dirty distinction. A man with a gun was arrested when Willkie spoke at Madison Square Garden, but unlike Roosevelt I, who got a bullet in his chest in Milwaukee during his Bull

Moose campaign, Willkie was not shot at.

The verbal bullets that tore the air in the Roosevelt-Taft-Wilson campaign made 1940's pot shots sound like popgun plips.

Wrote Iron Ore, a newspaper in Ishpeming, Mich.: "According to Roosevelt, he is the only man who can call others liars, rascals and thieves, terms he applies to Republicans generally. . . . Roosevelt is a pretty good liar himself. . . . Roosevelt lies and curses in a most disgusting way; he gets drunk, too, and that not infrequently, and all his intimates know about it." (T. R. sued for libel, asked for nominal damages, got 6-c-.)

In that campaign, each of the candidates was called insane. Bryan charged that Taft had "pressure on the brain." A Chicago lawyer offered $5,000 to charity if Roosevelt would submit to an alienist and take the consequences. Woodrow Wilson was not only accused by his political enemies of being insane, but of being syphilitic, sexually promiscuous.

One of the darkest nooks in the political madhouse was the Cleveland-Elaine campaign. James G. Elaine, who entered the Presidential race trailing a none-too-savory financial reputation, was covered with calumny. Burlesquing Gerome's painting of the noted Greek courtesan Phryne confounding her Athenian judges by her naked beauty, Puck's talented Gillam showed Republican Blaine standing coyly before his party leaders, his stout, bedrawered figure tattooed with his allegedly scandalous record. Democrats chanted: "Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, Continental liar from the State of Maine." Republicans got dirt in their fingernails digging up the story of Maria Halpin, a dipsomaniac widow by whom Cleveland had had an illegitimate child. Republicans intoned: "Ma, Ma, where's my Pa? Gone to the White House. Ha! Ha! Ha!" Democrats ghoulishly chiseled out the date of birth on Elaine's son's tombstone, then hinted that Blaine had married his son's mother under compulsion.

Looking back on records such as these, 1940's voters could take some small pride in the fact that, in spite of partisan bitterness--in spite of ignorance, passion and hypocrisy--the Republic's affairs were not last week generally debated in such ignoble terms.

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