Presidential Election Insults

The history of U.S. elections is one of barb and insult. Those good old days were not quite as gentlemanly as we like to envision them. In fact, they were down right insulting at times. This episode, which aired on Monday, Feb. 14 (I wonder if that was done with no small irony by Kyle for Valentine's Day) showed that well back into the 19th century, there was no love lost between candidates.

I enjoy coming up with these, because once I can get Kyle on a chuckling roll, it's fun to see how much I can get him to crack up. The one that did the trick was this passage, when I'm closing out the 19th century:

I’ll toss in a 20th century bonus --1912 was an absolute fiesta. Sitting president William Howard Taft called the previous president, now third-party candidate Theodore Roosevelt, a “dangerous egotist” and a “demagogue.” TR called his former hand-picked successor a “fathead” with the brain of a “guinea pig” and a “flubdub with a streak of the second rate and the common in him.” Woodrow Wilson labeled TR as “the most dangerous man of the age.” TR returned the favor that Wilson was “a damned presbyterian hypocrite and a Byzantine logothete,” “an infernal skunk in the White House.”

If milk were available, there would have been sinus irrigation.

Now this episode drew some phone calls to the station -- not by angry listeners -- but those who wanted to know what was that book we were using. Bad news here, it's not just one book. Those lovely campaign quotes have been collected over the years from several places.

However, if you want a single volume good starting place, one of my personal favorite authors on the presidents and their unusual proclivities and pronouncements was Paul Boller. The TCU professor had a series of books that ran under "Presidential . . . " -- Presidential Anecdotes and Presidential Campaigns have a lot of these in them.

And if you liked this episode, the same day we taped an "evergreen" on the end of civility in politics in general that will air sometime later this spring. It is full of many of the one-liners about politicians -- not from campaigns, per se, but opinions offered during the course of working together -- that were used on the @Were_History Twitter feed with the hashtag of #TheySaidIt during the end of January and the first of February.