A dirty campaign

A year or two after my daughter was married, she and her husband moved into a house in northern Vermont, one of those graceful, wooden colonial boxes which, kept painted white, stand out on the winter landscape like elegant snow houses. This one was built in the early 1770s and the essential element for surviving the Arctic winters was still there in running order – the primitive, but effective form of central heating which Benjamin Franklin had dreamed up 30 years before, to the eternal gratitude of his countrymen.

Until then, a log fire in the living room and hot-water bottles, I suppose you could call them, metal boxes filled with live coals for the bedsheets, that was the best they could do, just like my house in London in the 1930s. Franklin, who, by the way, invented also bifocals and the lightning rod, Franklin had the ingenious idea of a stove in the main room, at first open in front but then having an open circle on top with a moveable lid. The smoke passed over the top of a separate air chamber and down behind it before going up the chimney. The principle was that of a down draught and it's still wonderfully effective in houses that are not, as we must now say, 'winterised'.

Well, my daughter's 1770's house also had iron grilles in the floors of the upper rooms which allowed the heat from the main room to come up into the bedrooms. The rest of the house, the structure, was still sound but the plaster on the walls and layers of paint and then other layers of nineteenth-century wallpaper were cracking badly, so they tore the walls apart and, in the end, came on the original insulation – wads of spread newspapers, perhaps not the original ones. These were New England newspapers for the spring and summer of 1800, published during Thomas Jefferson's first run for the presidency.

Talk about inflammatory reporting! Candidates did not then, of course, rattle round the country. Rutted roads, 1500 miles from Maine to Florida, and mountainous roads as far as 200 miles west made campaigning impossible. You depended for your view of the candidates on published speeches, on the dispatches of partisan correspondence out of Washington, but mostly on what the political leaders of the two parties, the Federal and Jefferson's Democratic Republican party, chose to say about each other.

We could find no statement of issues, only tirades from one side aimed at the other. Tirades so explosive, so virulent with slander that the potshots Mr Bush took at Governor Dukakis and the governor at Mr Bush seem, by contrast, like a boy scout exercise with popguns.

These old papers which, remember, were northern papers, were pledged at the start to the Federal party and determined to guarantee the defeat of Jefferson, this detested Virginian with his brazen use of the word democracy – a dreadful doctrine threatening private property and the sacredness of marriage and one which spewed sentimental twaddle about the essential goodness of the common man.

From these voluminous reports out of Washington, we learned that Jefferson was a thief, a congenital liar, an adulterer, very likely a murderer, advocating the possession of property and women in common. A maniac. Early on, the Federalists dubbed him 'Mad Tom'.

A Fourth of July speech by Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale and a big man in New England, warned everybody that if Jefferson and his so-called Democrats came to power, the churches of America would turn into 'temples of reason so that we may behold a strumpet impersonating a goddess on the altars of Jehovah, and our wives and daughters the victims of a legal prostitution, the loathing of God and Man'.

The closest anyone came in the recent campaign to this sort of outrage was a Bush television commercial which assured us all that murderers and rapists would vote for Dukakis: a bit of rubbish that Mr Bush was quick to disown once it was out. In those old 1800 papers, there was a cartoon which in several terrifying variations became standard – Jefferson, with his partner, Satan. This one showed the two of them heaving away on a rope encircling a column which they're straining to pull down, and chiselled on the column are the lines, 'A Federal Government founded by G. Washington, J. Adams'.

Mr Timothy Dwight's outcry was not, from all the surrounding evidence, an oddity, an aberration, it set the tone of even the most respectable Federalists. The eminent Dwight followed the high road. You can only guess at the horrors being spouted along the low road. For then, as now, there were surely partisans – members of a campaign team, we should call them – who knew from previous experience of dirty campaigns, as one old Washington I know used to sing, 'You take the high road and I'll take the low road, and I'll be in Washington afore ye'.

In fact, looking back over some of the presidential campaigns of the nineteenth century, I've decided that the distinction between the high road of dignified oratory and the low road of slander and innuendo is a comparatively modern one. From the founding of the republic on to, say, the First World War, the low road was the tactical ground for all parties. There are slogans and campaign songs from the nineteenth century that would be instantly rejected by any presidential candidate today.

Lincoln was not only jeered at by his opponents as an uncouth rail-splitter from the prairie, he was regularly referred to in polite papers as 'the Ape'. During the Civil War, the London Times called him 'the Baboon' and I can't believe that, today, either party would compose and chant a song such as the Democrats of 1884 sang about their opponent who had denied, not very persuasively, some shady dealings with a railroad, 'Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of Maine'.

By contrast, the campaigns of this century have been almost genteel, so much so that in last week's, at least last weekend's, interminable television post-mortems, there was only one thing that the coroners agreed on. This, they said, was the dirtiest campaign in living memory. I noticed that the commentators who said this were young or early middle-aged so they may be excused from remembering the election of 40 years ago. Oddly, many of them referred to it in a false comparison between the campaign style of Harry S. Truman and Governor Dukakis. False, I think, on two counts.

One was to lament that the governor had not conducted a slam-bang Harry Truman campaign, but no campaign has room for two slam-bangers and, in this one, surprisingly, Mr Bush was it. By the time, about ten days before the election, Mr Dukakis woke up and attempted an impersonation of Harry Truman, the part was already filled.

The other fault was either a lapse of memory in people who'd been there, or a too-willing acceptance by the young of the prevailing myth about Mr Truman's countrywide safari. The myth is that his 1948 campaign was gutsy, passionate but clean. It was the dirtiest campaign in living memory and the down-to-earth mudslinger was Harry Truman. There was no television in those days, no television reporting, no coast-to-coast relay stations and, even before the campaign got under way, the popularity of Truman in the polls was so low, the general assumption that Governor Dewey of New York was practically elected, that many newspapers didn't bother to send reporters off on what has become Harry Truman's famous whistle-stop train ride.

Governor Dewey was in big cities before great crowds and on the radio making dignified, chiding speeches in his beautifully modulated baritone. Most of us heard about Truman's railroad campaign from snippets in the papers, picking up the news that he was endlessly denouncing the do-nothing 80th Congress, then expiring, and that small crowds at railroad stations in the southern swamps, in the mountains, in desert towns, rattling along the west coast, small crowds had picked up the welcoming cry, 'Give 'em hell, Harry!'.

There came a day when alarming news came into Governor Dewey's headquarters. Mr Truman was referring regularly to the governor as the American Mussolini and comparing the governor's toothbrush moustache unfavourably with Adolf Hitler's. The governor was sufficiently aroused to wire his state chairmen and wonder if he shouldn't switch his tone and reply in kind. 'No,' they said, 'you stay on the high road to the White House'. That year, 1948, was the year the phrase came in.

Well, as we now know, Dewey's decision was fatal. As for the do-nothing 80th Congress that Truman lit into every night and day, it performed, in fact, some memorable legislation. It passed the first act which banned the closed shop and required unions to make their finances public. More than anything, the 80th Congress passed and voted the enormous sum – then – of $12 billion for the Marshall Plan, which in Dean Acheson's memorable phrase 'repaired the fabric of European life'. But Truman won and how he won has never been allowed to interfere with his subsequent works and his reputation.

Which moves me to bring a little consolation to all the nervous Europeans who, in the echo of Mr Bush's promises, fear for the deficit, for the maintenance of Star Wars, for the sacred promise of 'Read My Lips No New Taxes' – the first job of any new administration is to liquidate its campaign rhetoric as soon as possible.

Mr Bush's liquidation is likely to be very swift, though I think he's not likely to be as swift, or blunt, as an old Southerner, a famous governor of Louisiana, who got elected on a promise to stop the appointment of local sheriffs and allow the voters to pick them. When he got in, he immediately banned such elections. A crowd of protesting delegates came to his office and he refused to see them.

He told an aide to go and talk to them. 'But,' asked the aide, 'what'll I tell 'em?' 'Tell 'em,' said the governor, 'I lied.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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