What Happened to Sex Scandals? Politics and Peccadilloes,
Jefferson to Kennedy

John H. Summers

"Any man familiar with public life realizes the foul gossip which ripples just under the surface about almost every public man, and especially about every President," observed Theodore Roosevelt in 1913. Varieties of "foul gossip" have plagued officeholders from the founding of the Republic to the present day, as Roosevelt suggested. Yet the nature, effects, and reach of gossip have undergone curious and sometimes striking transformations over the years. Think of one especially common topic of discussion: a politician's reputation for sexual rectitude. In the early republic and throughout the nineteenth century, American political culture subjected the sexual character of officeholders to close, steady, and often unflattering scrutiny, as most voters insisted a man of virtue constituted "the only safe depository of public trust."1 By the beginning of the twentieth century, by contrast, revelations of sexual turpitude among the most prominent elected officials had begun to disappear from public life. Whereas Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, and other members of the nineteenth-century political elite negotiated their reputations among a broad array of publics, in the new era men such as Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy benefited from this more circumspect pattern in political speech. Theodore Roosevelt's remark is doubly useful in this respect. For if "foul gossip" could still circulate in 1913, it had already started to travel, not openly, but rather "just under the surface" of public life.	1
What explains this transformation? Historians regularly observe that during the first decades of the century, gossip, confession, and exposure arose as distinctive attributes of mass communication, corroding Victorian modesty in virtually every arena of American life. Indeed, a "repeal of reticence" helps define this era and its aftermath. So why could the leading figures in American politics increasingly expect political culture to spare their sexual transgressions from the popular scrutiny endured by their predecessors? In examining this, the guiding problem of the essay, I consider and reject a number of possible explanations and finally settle on two key developments: changes in the ideology and practice of professional journalism and the psychology of insulation that accompanied the emergence of a newly nationalized political elite at the dawn of the last century.2	2
Criticism of the sexual rectitude of politicians first surfaced as a regular part of American public life in the acrimonious milieu of the 1780s and 1790s. During those transitional decades, while John Adams and other leading officials entreated the electorate for "Decency, and Respect, and Veneration . . . for Persons in Authority," older notions of deference and reticence began to recede. In their place emerged a fierce brand of political combat that regarded personal morality as a legitimate field of battle. James Callender, in his History of the United States for 1796, ruminated about the "real character of some people"; charges he made elsewhere drew public attention to the supposed extramarital affairs of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Personalized attacks of this sort provoked bitter objections. The Federalist-inspired Sedition Act (1798)—the early republic's most notable attempt to quell clamorous political dialogue—treated "scandalous and malicious writing or writings against" any elected official as treasonous behavior. However odious the motivations of the Federalists, even staunch defenders of a free press bemoaned the growing frequency of personal invective. "If by the Liberty of the Press were understood merely the Liberty of discussing the Propriety of Public Measures and political opinions, let us have as much of it as you please," Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1789, petitioning the Pennsylvania legislature for a civil libel statute. "But if it means the Liberty of affronting, calumniating, and defaming one another, I, for my part . . . shall cheerfully consent to exchange my Liberty of Abusing others for the Privilege of not being abus'd myself."3	. . .