{"id":24427,"date":"2016-03-06T09:02:40","date_gmt":"2016-03-06T17:02:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/think-trump-was-crude-founding-fathers-were-too\/"},"modified":"2016-03-06T09:02:40","modified_gmt":"2016-03-06T17:02:40","slug":"think-trump-was-crude-founding-fathers-were-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/think-trump-was-crude-founding-fathers-were-too\/","title":{"rendered":"Think Trump was crude? Founding Fathers were, too"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK<\/strong> \u2014 You could say politics has reached a new low with the \u201csmall hands\u201d remarks from the Republican debate.<\/p>\n

But the exchange over the size of Donald Trump\u2019s, um, hands is merely the most recent vulgarity in American politics. The history of crude remarks goes back to the Founding Fathers.<\/p>\n

In the 18th century, John Adams called Alexander Hamilton a \u201cbastard brat\u201d and wrote that Hamilton had \u201ca superabundance of secretions which he could not find whores enough to draw off,\u201d according to historian Ron Chernow.<\/p>\n

One difference between then and now: \u201cThese were words written or spoken in private, not in public,\u201d said Chernow, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Alexander Hamilton helped inspire the hit Broadway musical \u201cHamilton.\u201d (Chernow says the comments were quoted in letters.)<\/p>\n

In the 1880s, rumors of Grover Cleveland\u2019s out-of-wedlock child led to a song from his Republican opponents: \u201cMa, ma, where\u2019s my pa?\u201d When Cleveland won the presidency, the response came: \u201cGone to the White House, ha ha ha!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOld-fashioned American politics was full of those kinds of vile comments,\u201d said Arnold Shober, who teaches government at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. \u201cWe\u2019ve kind of lost that over the last 70 years, and I think it\u2019s just coming back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not that 20th century politicians shied away from vulgarities. Here\u2019s President Bill Clinton describing his 1970s El Camino pickup truck: \u201cI had Astroturf in the back. You don\u2019t want to know why, but I did.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Clinton\u2019s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright proved that she could talk dirty when she said: \u201cThis is not cojones. This is cowardice,\u201d after Cuba shot down Cuban-American exiles flying civilian planes.<\/p>\n

Fast-forward to the Republican presidential campaign. A week ago, Sen. Marco Rubio, talking about Trump, said: \u201cAnd you know what they say about men with small hands.\u201d In Thursday\u2019s GOP debate, Trump said of his hands: \u201cIf they are small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there is no problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump also has called Rubio \u201clittle Marco.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sex therapist Judy Kuriansky said sex talk among men \u201cis their way of comparing themselves and evaluating their influence and their power over each other. Certainly that was the allusion\u201d at the debate.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything is related to potency and power in direct relationship to size,\u201d she added. \u201cI\u2019m taller than you and my penis is bigger than you and therefore I\u2019m more powerful than you.\u201d<\/p>\n

What do voters think? Those who like Trump seem to give it a pass. Those who don\u2019t are disgusted.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s too much political correctness,\u201d said Trump supporter Carol Ebright at a Trump rally in Cadillac, Michigan, on Friday. \u201cI want to see the \u2018Get things done!\u2019 not the \u2018Did you hear what he said?\u2019\u201d She carried a sign that said: \u201cThe silent majority stands with Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Amy Woody, a self-described moderate-to-liberal voter from eastern Tennessee, said Trump\u2019s crude language is \u201ccompletely inappropriate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI have extremely thick skin,\u201d said Woody, who spent 16 years in the U.S. Air Force in squadrons that were typically less than 20 percent female. \u201cI served in the military for a long time. We probably joked much more inappropriately than your standard workplace. It\u2019s not done with any malice or disrespect. Male, female, it doesn\u2019t matter. You all just wear a uniform. We all dish out the same comments to each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in a presidential campaign, she said, \u201cit\u2019s tacky and trashy, and I think all politicians, especially someone running for president, should have at least a trace of class and dignity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just because Trump can get away with it, though, doesn\u2019t mean the rest of us can. Using crude language or mocking others in the workplace can get you reprimanded, fired or sued.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat type of comment in the workplace could be viewed as offensive and creating a hostile work environment,\u201d said Richard Corenthal, a labor and employment lawyer with Meyer Suozzi English & Klein in New York. \u201cAn employer may be liable if put on notice about these types of comments and if they allow them to continue.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether legal or not, whether appropriate or not, one thing is clear: Trump\u2019s comments don\u2019t represent some grand fall in decorum. Political mudslinging has gone on for centuries and our tolerance for vulgarities has built up over time.<\/p>\n

\u201cPolitics has emerged as essentially a reality TV show, and that\u2019s why Trump is able to use it so deftly: He understands the format. He built his campaign around it,\u201d said Andrew Ricci, vice president of Levick, a Washington, D.C. public relations firm.<\/p>\n

At the New York State Republican convention in Buffalo, Friday, Pamela Helming, town supervisor of Canandaigua, New York, worried that the GOP candidates\u2019 bickering \u201cis just going to turn people off and we\u2019re not going to see the voters turn out.\u201d<\/p>\n

She added: \u201cSome of the crude comments, you expect some bickering, some negativity, but I do believe they\u2019ve crossed a line.\u201d<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Associated Press reporters John Flesher in Michigan and Carolyn Thompson in New York contributed to this report.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Follow Beth Harpaz at https:\/\/twitter.com\/girlsinthevan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK \u2014 You could say politics has reached a new low with the \u201csmall hands\u201d remarks from the Republican debate. But the exchange over the size of Donald Trump\u2019s, um, hands is merely the most recent vulgarity in American politics. The history of crude remarks goes back to the Founding Fathers. In the 18th […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-24427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24427\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24427"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=24427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}