Sunday, September 07, 2025
Political Invective
Dumas Malone (1892-1986), Jefferson and His Time, vol. 3: Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty (1948; rpt. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962), p. 391:
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The violence of newspaper talk at that time, both on the part of editors and anonymous correspondents, cannot fail to impress the modern reader even though he be inured to political invective....The political tricks of the day — name-calling, allegations of guilt by association, and the like — were so similar to those employed within present memory that twentieth-century demagogues of either the right or left would have felt very much at home, no doubt, if translated to the late eighteenth century.
