Just in Case You Thought Negative Campaigning Started with the Blogosphere...

Just heard about Joseph Cummins' new book, Anything for a Vote, about the history of, shall we say, strenuous campaigning...it's hilarious and enlightening. Here are some snippets:

• 1836: Congressman Davy Crockett accuses candidate Martin Van Buren of secretly wearing women's clothing: "He is laced up in corsets!"
• 1912: Theodore Roosevelt is shot in the chest while preparing to give a campaign speech, then proceeds to deliver it anyway: "I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose!"
• 1960: Former president Harry Truman advises voters that "if you vote for Richard Nixon, you ought to go to hell!"
  

And this tibdit about the election in 1800 between Jefferson and Adams...

The Federalists couldn’t get enough of attacking Jefferson in a very, very personal way---their assaults sound like the insults leveled at Bill Clinton, another Southerner, almost 200 years later. "Jefferson is a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia Mulatto father," said one leaflet. A Connecticut paper raised the specter of the French Revolution, supposedly beloved by Jefferson: "Are you prepared to see your dwellings in flames ... female chastity violated, [your] children writhing on the pike? GREAT GOD OF COMPASSION AND JUSTICE, SHIELD MY COUNTRY FROM DESTRUCTION!"