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to Current Controversies: History Behind the Headlines
Today, there is a widespread sense
among the American public that politics has grown more venomous
in recent years and that no facet of a politician's private life
is off-limits to public scrutiny. Public concern with "the
politics of personal destruction" burst into the political
spotlight during the 1980s after President Ronald Reagan nominated
Robert Bork for the U.S. Supreme Court, and his opponents investigated
the videotapes that the nominee had rented.
Thus it comes as a surprise to
learn that in the rough-and-tumble world of early American politics,
every subject was fair game, including the purported sex lives
of politicians. During the presidential campaign of 1800, President
John Adams was accused of sending a friend to Europe to procure
mistresses. Adams responded by joking that if the reports were
true, General Pickering had kept them for himself. Thomas Jefferson
was subsequently accused of fathering numerous mulatto children
by his slave Sally Hemings. In 1828, John Quincy Adams's opponents
charged that that when the President had served as Minister to
Russia, he had offered his children's nanny as a royal mistress.
In that same election, President Adams' supporters accused Andrew
Jackson of committing adultery because he married his wife while
she was still legally married to her first husband (a story that
was technically true, even though neither Jackson nor his wife
Rachel knew that her first husband was still alive). Martin Van
Buren's Vice President, Richard Johnson, was accused of keeping
a black concubine.
Perhaps the most striking example
of sexual scandal in early American politics involved Treasury
Secretary Alexander Hamilton. In 1792, a convicted swindler named
James Reynolds accused Hamilton of giving him money from the U.S.
Treasury to speculate with in the stock market. When three members
of Congress quietly investigated the charges, Hamilton admitted
giving money to Reynolds, but said the funds were his own, and
that he paid them to cover up an adulterous affair with Reynolds's
wife, Maria. The members of Congress concluded that Hamilton's
misconduct was wholly a private matter and kept it secret.
In 1797, however, the accusations
came to public light when a journalist named James Callender published
a pamphlet accusing Hamilton of misusing Treasury funds and colluding
with speculators. Hamilton responded by publishing letters documenting
his "irregular and indelicate" affair with Maria Reynolds.
"The charge against me is a connection with one James Reynolds
for purposes of improper pecuniary speculation," Hamilton
wrote. "My real crime is an amorous connection with his wife."
Deeply concerned that his reputation
for public virtue not be tarnished, Hamilton was willing to publicly
confess to sexual misconduct, even though his confession deeply
hurt his wife. He never held public office again.
Callender seems to have gotten
his information from John Beckley, a supporter of Thomas Jefferson.
Beckley, the first clerk of the House of Representatives, had
been dismissed from this position when the Federalists had won
control of the House in 1796. Callender expected to be rewarded
by the Jeffersonians after he was jailed under the Alien and Sedition
Acts. When Jefferson was slow to release him from prison and failed
to award Callender a position as a postmaster, Callender published
the story, which seems to be confirmed by genetic testing, that
Jefferson was the father of numerous children by a slave mistress.
Yet what is especially striking
in retrospect is that the politics of sexual scandal repeatedly
failed. No where is this more apparent than during the presidential
campaign of 1884, when Democratic Presidential candidate Grover
Cleveland was accused of fathering a child out of wedlock. In
1874, Maria C. Halpin, a 33-year-old widow, gave birth to a son
whom she named Oscar Folsom Cleveland. She had kept company with
several men, and although Cleveland was never sure that he was
the child's father, he provided the woman with financial support.
Later he had her committed to an insane asylum and the child to
an orphanage.
During the 1884 campaign, Republicans,
chanting the slogan "Ma, Ma, Where's My Pa," wore white
ribbons and dedicated their campaign to "Home Protection."
But the Democratic Cleveland won the race, as his supporters responded,
"Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!"
In the twentieth century, in sharp
contrast to the nineteenth, a conspiracy of silence generally
protected the presidents' private lives from public scrutiny.
Prior to his second marriage, Woodrow Wilson had a relationship
with a woman named Mary Allen Hulbert. Franklin Roosevelt had
an affair with Lucy Page Mercer, whom Eleanor Roosevelt had hired
as her social secretary. Mercer was with President Roosevelt when
he died in 1945 in Warm Springs, Georgia. During World War II,
General Dwight Eisenhower had an extra-marital relationship with
Kate Summersby, his personal secretary and military aide. After
the war, the two never saw each other again. Beginning in the
1970s, over a decade after his assassination, reports linked John
F. Kennedy with a Mafia moll, Judith Exner, and the actress Marilyn
Monroe.
Between Woodrow Wilson and Bill
Clinton, the one major exception to this rule was Warren Harding,
yet even in this case, reports of presidential adultery followed
his death. For fifteen years, Harding had an affair with Carrie
Phillips, the wife of a close friend. After World War I broken
out in Europe, she threatened to reveal their affair unless Harding
voted against a U.S. declaration of war. After Harding received
the Republican presidential nomination in 1920, the Republican
National Committee sent her family on an all-expense paid trip
to Japan and paid her $20,000 to keep quiet. Later, a woman named
Nan Britten claimed that she had an illicit affair with Harding,
including trysts in a White House cloak closet, and that the he
had gotten her pregnant. Recent historical scholarship has cast
doubt on aspects of this story.
American reactions to sexual scandals
involving prominent politicians appear to be influenced by two
traditions rooted in the country's colonial past, one stressing
personal rectitude; the other emphasizing contrition, public confession,
and forgiveness. A key issue raised during the controversy over
President Bill Clinton's relationship with White House intern
Monica Lewinsky is whether political leaders' public and private
lives can be separated and whether their moral authority demands
that they be held to higher standards than ordinary citizens. |
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