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

Abstract

Any man familiar with public life realizes which ripples under about almost every public man, and especially about every President, observed Theodore Roosevelt in 1913. Varieties of foul gossip have plagued officeholders from founding of Republic to present day, as Roosevelt suggested. Yet nature, effects, and reach of have undergone curious and sometimes striking transformations over years. Think of one especially common topic of discussion: a politician's reputation for sexual rectitude. In early republic and throughout nineteenth century, American political culture subjected 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 beginning of twentieth century, by contrast, revelations of sexual turpitude among most prominent elected officials had begun to disappear from public life. Whereas Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, and other members of nineteenth-century political elite negotiated their reputations among a broad array of publics, in 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 surface of public life. What explains this transformation? Historians regularly observe that during first decades of century, gossip, confession, and exposure arose as distinctive attributes of mass communication, corroding Victorian modesty in virtually every