20 Dirty Campaign Tricks That Rocked Elections Long Before Social Media

On election night in 1948, Lyndon Johnson trailed former Texas Gov. Coke Stevenson in a Senate runoff race. But six days later, Box 13, a ballot box in Alice, Texas, yielded approximately 200 “new” ballots, nearly all for Johnson, in alphabetical order and written in the same ink. The ballots included the names of dead voters. A court prevented a recount and Johnson narrowly won. Decades later, the judge who certified the election results said that the vote had been fixed at the behest of a local political kingmaker. Johnson became president.

In 1950, Republican Congressman Richard Nixon ran against Democratic Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas for a California Senate seat amid the Red Scare of the Cold War. Murray Chotiner, Nixon’s campaign manager, had more than 500,000 copies of a flyer printed on pink paper showing which votes Douglas had cast alongside a left-wing member of Congress, leading Nixon to nickname her “the Pink Lady.” Nixon won the election by nearly 700,000 votes.

The socialist novelist Upton Sinclair’s candidacy for governor of California in 1934 was based on a platform of eliminating poverty. This raised alarm bells at MGM, where studio heads Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg worried about the prospect of higher corporate taxes. The studio released newsreels called “California Election News” in which they filmed actors pretending to be opponents of Sinclair’s, and actors pretending to be vagrants saying they would flock to California if Sinclair were elected. Thalberg admitted years later that he used actors from the MGM studio and stock footage. That fall, the Republican Frank Merriam won the governor’s office.

In 1828, during Andrew Jackson’s presidential run against John Quincy Adams, he found himself on the wrong end of a series of pamphlets from the Philadelphia publisher John Binns. Titled Some Account of the Bloody Deeds of General Jackson, the broadsides depicted six black coffins. They referred to General Jackson’s decision, during the Creek War, to execute six Tennessee militiamen convicted by court-martial of desertion, which was a legal punishment under the army’s rules. Despite these attacks, Jackson won the election.

In October 1924, four days before the British general election, the Daily Mail ran a letter attributed to Grigory Zinoviev, the Moscow-based head of the Communist International, which called for sedition among army units in Britain. The letter was leaked by intelligence officers and Conservative operatives who knew it was most likely a forgery by anti-Bolshevik Russians based in Riga, a conclusion later confirmed by a 1999 Foreign Office review. It contributed to a Conservative landslide which brought down the Labour government of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, despite the fact that Labour’s vote share had increased.

Al Smith, the New York governor and the first Roman Catholic to be nominated by a major party, ran for president in 1928 against Republican Herbert Hoover. He faced a flood of anti-Catholic propaganda, including pamphlets and postcards from Ku Klux Klan members claiming he would build a tunnel 3,500 miles long connecting the White House to the Vatican so that the Pope could direct the U.S. government. He lost in a landslide, with five Southern states switching their allegiance from the Democratic Party for the first time since Reconstruction.

Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland headed a committee that had declared Senator Joseph McCarthy’s allegations of Soviet infiltration a fraud and a hoax. During the last week of his 1950 reelection bid against John Marshall Butler, about 300,000 copies of a flyer circulated. The photo had been physically spliced together in a darkroom, merging a 1938 picture of Tydings with a 1950 photo of former Communist Party leader Earl Browder in order to imply that the pair had met. Tydings lost. A Senate subcommittee later denounced the picture as a “despicable campaign trick.”

Two weeks before the 1888 election, a California Republican named George Osgoodby posed as a naturalized citizen, “Charles F. Murchison,” and wrote to Britain’s ambassador to the United States, Sir Lionel Sackville-West, asking which presidential candidate was more likely to support Britain’s interests. The ambassador replied that Cleveland was preferable. Republicans published the letter exchange throughout the country and distributed “England’s Choice” flyers in Irish-American neighborhoods. Cleveland lost New York by roughly 13,000 votes, a crucial margin that cost him the Electoral College, even though he won the national popular vote.

In the presidential election of 1800, Vice President Thomas Jefferson challenged incumbent Federalist President John Adams for the office. Secretly, Jefferson paid radical Virginia pamphleteer James T. Callender over $100 to publish scathing attacks on Adams, calling him a “hideous hermaphroditical character,” and leaving Jefferson himself safely above the din. Jefferson won. But after Jefferson refused to give Callender a postmaster position, Callender leaked the payment details and publicized Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, a woman he enslaved.

In 1940, during Franklin Roosevelt’s re-election campaign, his team learned that his Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie, was having an affair with newspaper editor Lucile Davenport. “Spread it as a word-of-mouth thing,” FDR told his aides, adding, “way, way down the line.” He made sure all of his party’s national speakers remained silent about the matter, so the word could not be traced back to him, and no one in the Democratic Party publicly revealed the news. At the time, FDR was also having his own private affair.

During the 1920 presidential race, Ohio professor William Estabrook Chancellor fabricated a family tree for Republican candidate Warren Harding, claiming his great-grandmother was Black, invoking the era’s racist belief that any Black ancestry made a person Black. Hostile operatives funded the project, which produced more than 250,000 flyers sent nationwide. Federal agents and Republican operatives intercepted and destroyed many of them in railway mail cars. Harding still won the election. In 2015, DNA testing of his descendants disproved the ancestry claims entirely.

Two weeks before the election in 1880, a New York newspaper called Truth printed a facsimile letter supposedly written by Republican presidential candidate James Garfield to a fictional labor official named H.L. Morey, endorsing cheap Chinese labor to cut American wages. Democratic committees printed more than 500,000 copies and distributed them among working-class and western precincts. Garfield’s campaign issued a denial. Investigations revealed the postmark was forged and that “Morey” was a fake. He was elected, but narrowly lost California by only 144 votes.

Weeks before the 1844 election, a pro-Whig paper printed an excerpt purporting to be from a travel journal written by a fictional “Baron Roorback.” In it, the Baron wrote that he saw 40 enslaved people branded with the initials of the Democratic presidential nominee, James Polk. The story ran in several northern Whig newspapers, and Democrats scrambled to debunk it. They found out that “Baron Roorback” was completely made up, and that the anecdote about the slaves being branded had been lifted from a legitimate travel book by a Whig newspaperman. Nevertheless, Polk was elected president. Soon after, “roorback” entered the lexicon as a term for last-minute political fabrications.

Victoria Woodhull, who became the first woman to run for president when she represented the Equal Rights Party in 1872, published charges herself that prominent minister Henry Ward Beecher was having an affair. Postal inspector Anthony Comstock and others responded by arresting her on November 2 for mailing “obscene” materials through the post office. On Election Day, which was November 5, 1872, Woodhull was behind bars in a New York City jail instead of campaigning.

In October 1888, William Wade Dudley, treasurer of the Republican National Committee, sent county chairmen in Indiana a confidential letter telling them to organize “floaters,” the persuadable voters, in groups of five and to appoint a captain for each group who would “keep them in check” until they voted. The Democratic mail clerk intercepted the letter and published it. Republican Benjamin Harrison narrowly won Indiana and the presidency. The furor over the Dudley letter contributed to a movement that led states to adopt the secret ballot in use today.

When Theodore Roosevelt ran for president in 1912 as the Progressive “Bull Moose” Party candidate against William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, rumors circulated that he suffered from late-stage syphilis and was a chronic drunk. When George Newett, an editor in Michigan, wrote an article that October calling him a drunkard, Roosevelt filed a suit for libel. At the trial in May 1913, in Marquette, Michigan, witnesses testified on Roosevelt’s behalf that he consumed little to no alcohol and had no signs of disease. Newett recanted in open court, and Roosevelt won the case.

In 1946, Navy veteran Richard Nixon ran against the five-term incumbent Jerry Voorhis for a California House seat. Nixon’s campaign had callers phone up voters in the district and ask, “Did you know Jerry Voorhis is a communist?” then hang up after saying, “Thank you.” No one was allowed to answer. The claim was untrue. In fact, Voorhis had authored a 1940 law that required subversive groups to register with the government. Nixon won anyway and started his political career in Congress.

In New York in October 1884, a minister named Samuel Burchard, who was campaigning for the Republican candidate, James Blaine, said Democrats were the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” slamming Catholics and Southern whites in one fell swoop. Blaine didn’t quickly distance himself from the remark. Overnight, Democratic campaign workers printed up hundreds of thousands of pamphlets, then passed them out at Catholic churches before Blaine had a chance to address it. He ended up losing New York State by just 1,047 votes and ceded the presidency to Grover Cleveland.

In December 1863, two reporters for the New York World, David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman, anonymously published a 72-page pamphlet that invented the term “miscegenation” and stated that Republicans wanted the government to officially support intermarriage between the races. The authors distributed it to abolitionists and Republicans in an effort to trick them into endorsing the policy, and Democratic newspapers propagated the hoax until 1864 to intimidate white voters. President Abraham Lincoln dismissed the hoax and was reelected.

In the days before state elections in November 1883, Danville’s white Democratic leaders published a circular titled “Coalition Rule in Danville” that falsely accused Black city councilmen, members of a biracial coalition under the leadership of William Mahone, of insulting white women. On November 3, armed white Democrats ignited a street fight that left five dead. Fearful of retaliation, Black voters stayed away from the polls. Democrats won control of the state legislature, embarking on decades of Jim Crow disenfranchisement.

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