ARCHIVAL (2012):
NEWS REPORT: We have a new study that’s out, and it says this is the most negative campaign in history.

ARCHIVAL (2016):
NEWS REPORT: This is undoubtedly going to be the most negative, nasty, divisive campaign in history.

ED LARSON (UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, PEPPERDINE): Negative campaigning has always been in the American bloodstream.

ARCHIVAL (2020):
NEWS REPORT: The single most negative, sleazy campaign. 

ARCHIVAL (2024):
NEWS REPORT: Prepare for the most negative campaign in history.

ED LARSON: It’s part of how campaigns in democracies work.

ARCHIVAL (DAISY AD, 1964):
DAISY GIRL: One, two …

ED LARSON: When I look back at my lifetime, think of that ad Lyndon Johnson put out against Barry Goldwater.

ARCHIVAL (DAISY AD, 1964):
PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON: We must either love each other, or we must die.

ED LARSON: It’s a race between two people and you’ve got to differentiate.

TITLE:
POLITICKING: A 19TH CENTURY CAMPAIGN SERIES
“GOING NEGATIVE”

JEFFREY PASLEY (PROFESSOR OF EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI): George Washington’s most brilliant campaign move ever was to not make himself king. At the end of the Revolutionary War, he was just so far above everyone else. They say the presidency could not have been created if everyone didn’t know that Washington would be the person.

ED LARSON: But people knew that Washington was heavily inclined not to seek a third term. In his cabinet, there had been an amazing rise of factional politics. He said, look, I want to go back to build up my plantation. I don’t want any part of this.

JEFFREY PASLEY: Everyone is holding their fire until the farewell address. It’s the starting of the first contested presidential election.

TEXT ON SCREEN:
ROUND 1: 1796

ED LARSON: The two logical candidates are John Adams – vice president under Washington, who believed in a strong national government – and Thomas Jefferson, who had been secretary of state and had been pushing for states’ rights.

JEFFREY PASLEY: The founders saw, like, any campaigning at the national level as extremely problematic. They preferred to believe the sort of person who would actually promote themselves for office was an ambitious person who should not get office. So, campaigning takes place in the press.

ED LARSON: It wasn’t set parties, but there was a highly factionalized press. You start seeing a lot of articles, essays where they would assail Adams and Jefferson.

JEFFREY PASLEY: In October 1796, a series of essays written under a pseudonym appeared in the  Philadelphia press. Then, they’re compiled into books: The Pretensions of Thomas Jefferson. It’s like the first highly coordinated, thematically organized negative campaign that anyone ever put together.

ED LARSON: What the Constitution says, how they originally designed it, people really didn’t vote for president. This is still true, but nobody notices it now. You vote for electors. The electors each have two votes. Whoever gets the most votes from a majority of the electors becomes president and whoever gets the second most votes becomes vice president.

The result is, when they vote, Adams comes in first, but only three votes behind comes Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson becomes Adams’ vice president. They have diametrically opposed views of what the government should be.

JEFFREY PASLEY: It’s awkward. Jefferson, while he’s vice president, he’s kinda sitting there with nothing better to do than to talk to newspaper editors, strategize with people.

ED LARSON: With Jefferson feeding them stuff from the inside, the Republican press just starts hammering the Adams administration. They pass the Sedition Act to bar any criticism of the government or the president. Newspapers, dozens of them, were shut down. They prosecute one poor guy for saying that John Adams has a fat ass, which is demonstrably true. There’s basically four years of campaigning, and it was clear that there would be a rematch.

TEXT ON SCREEN:
ROUND 2: 1800

JEFFREY PASLEY: In 1800, the Bible belt of America was New England, the old Puritan states. Preachers are getting up and denouncing Jefferson from the pulpit: That Jefferson was going to ban the Bible, that Jefferson was going to abolish marriage.

ED LARSON: You had the Republican press lashing into Adams, being a monarchist, being a tyrant: King John, and he wants to have his son, John Quincy Adams, take over after he’s gone.

JEFFREY PASLEY: The 1800 election gets even nastier because it doesn’t resolve cleanly. And again, it has to do with the flaws in the Constitution.

ED LARSON: Jefferson doesn’t want to take office with Adams as his vice president. So he settles on Aaron Burr as a running mate. Every single Republican elector votes for Jefferson and Burr. But the problem is, they both get the same number of votes. So, even though everybody, every elector, thinks they’re voting for Jefferson as president and Aaron Burr as vice president, it’s a tie and it goes to the House of Representatives.

JEFFREY PASLEY: Alexander Hamilton was a former treasury secretary. He considered himself to be Washington’s prime minister. He’s back in New York, working as a lawyer, but he’s still pulling all the strings. Hamilton and Burr’s enmity was something that had existed. They had been rivals in New York politics, hating each other and competing with each other for years.

ED LARSON: Hamilton has come back out of the woodwork, come down from New York, and said, you can’t elect Aaron Burr. He writes these letters just denouncing Burr and says there is no man in the world I should hate more than Thomas Jefferson, but at least he’s an honorable man. Meanwhile, in Congress, they voted again and they voted again. Finally, after the 35th ballot, Jefferson, in the end, becomes president.

JEFFREY PASLEY: Hamilton definitely set himself on the road to death by some of the things he said against Burr. Burr was kind of waiting for his chance to challenge him. That ends up with the two of them in Weehawken, New Jersey for a duel. Hamilton may have shot in the air. Burr shot him dead. With negative campaigning and toxic politics, it’s like, it’s hard to get more toxic than the sitting vice president shoots down the leader of the opposition party.

(END)