The Second Coming of Scandal

#### "What Happened to Sex Scandals? Politics and Peccadilloes, Jefferson to Kennedy" by John H. Summers, in The Journal of American History (Dec. 2000), 1215 E. Atwater Ave., Bloomington, Ind. 47401–3703.

At the 1912 Democratic National Convention, which nominated New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson for president, there were whispers about Wilson’s close friendship with a woman not his wife. He worried about possible public scandal, but none occurred. The country by then, writes Summers, a doctoral candidate in American history at the University of Rochester, had entered a new era of public reticence about the sexual transgressions, real or imagined, of active political leaders. This represented a sea change in American politics.

"In the early republic and throughout the 19th century . . . the sexual character of officeholders [was subjected] to close, steady, and often unflattering scrutiny," he notes. Alexander Hamilton was forced to acknowledge an adulterous affair; Thomas Jefferson was accused of a liaison with one of his slaves; Andrew Jackson was denounced for having lived in sin with a married woman; William Henry Harrison supposedly had fathered illegitimate children; and Grover Cleveland was accused during his 1884 presidential campaign of having seduced a young woman and fathered her child. (Cleveland candidly acknowledged his possible paternity, and was elected.)

Intense partisanship, openly expressed after the emergence of the party system, played a role in the close scrutiny of politicians’ character, Summers says, but so did genuine conviction. "American republicanism . . . regarded solid moral character as a sine qua non of good government." Evangelical Protestantism also encouraged 19th-century voters to seek men of sound character for public office.

The uproar over Cleveland’s derelictions, however, "proved the last major scandal of its kind for more than 100 years," Summers says. Though Theodore Roosevelt in 1913 noted "the foul gossip which ripples just under the surface about almost every public man," what was new, Summers points out, was that the foul gossip stayed below ground. Only after they were dead did the public learn of the apparently adulterous behavior of Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy.

Progressive reformers, favoring "a more intellectualized, ‘educative’ brand of politics," altered public life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, says Summers. American journalism underwent a metamorphosis—from fierce partisanship to high-minded "professionalism." Harper’s Weekly editor George Harvey declared in 1908 that the journalist had become "the accepted and most potent guide of the masses," and must seek "to uplift humanity, not to profit by its degradation."

"Once, evangelicals and republicans appealed to the populace to discipline and monitor the morality of political elites," observes Summers. "Now, political elites were charged with the discipline of the populace." The new reticence proved especially useful to reporters, allowing them "to get closer" to government officials, who could rest assured that their "secrets" were safe. As the century progressed, and the government, faced with the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, grew larger and more powerful, keeping officials’ peccadilloes secret came to seem vitally important. In recent decades, with Vietnam and Watergate, that changed, of course. And with the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998, says Summers, the era of reticence definitely came to an end.