Listener Call


PETER: If you’re just tuning in, this is BackStory. And we’re talking today about the American obsession with scandal. As always, we’ve been inviting your comments on the topic. And one of our listeners left an interesting thought on our website. I got a comment here from Courtney in Los Angeles, guys. Let me read it to you.

Benjamin Franklin kept mistresses and was involved in the Hellfire Club without much rebuke. Grover Cleveland in the 19th century raped and impregnated a woman. She was left publicly shamed and her baby was taken away from her. And ultimately, she died in poverty and in shame. JFK had famous mistresses.

However, when we get to Clinton, he almost loses his job for his consensual affair. With the recent New York mayoral election, Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer were almost public jokes for thinking that they could make a comeback after their scandals. I almost wonder if the denunciation the public now ascribes to figureheads is a backlash for the lack of blame we’ve pinned to our public figures in the past.

Are we re-appropriating the fault from the less powerful person– that is, the woman– to the more powerful, the man? Or is our society simply more critical these days?

So guys, that’s a long and interesting question. And I think it boils down to this. Who is responsible for scandals? There always have been scandals. Who gets the blame? And has that changed? And why has it changed?

ED: Courtney asks about Grover Cleveland. And strangely enough, that actually is a very interesting case. I’m not sure that people would normally associate Grover Cleveland and something interesting. But I’m going to tell you that it is.

But before that, somebody else we might not think of as associated with sex scandals, which was Andrew Jackson. Because when Jackson was running, the great scandal that his opponents counted on to keep him for being elected was the fact that he had married a woman, Rachel, who was actually married to another man. And so they called it bigamy. But they’re really talking about Andrew Jackson is consorting with a loose woman.

Now as it turned out, Rachel dies during the early days of the Jackson presidency. And Jackson blames the scandalmongers for saying that to suggest that she was an adulterer and a loose woman was an outrageous. So that becomes a huge scandal. If you think about before the Civil War, that would have been the role of a blame-worthy woman in the eyes of their opponents.

So 50 years later, things haven’t really changed that much. Grover Cleveland is running for president of the United States. A Buffalo newspaper of the Republicans unearth a story about Grover Cleveland fathering a child with a woman, Maria Halpin. And he admits it. Yes, I did.

And some people have said, well, he was actually just covering for other men who also slept with her, but who were married. But the fact remains that the child was put into an orphanage. Maria Halpin was admitted to a mental institution. And though historians debate whether or not Cleveland raped Halpin, she could hardly have been in a less powerful position.

BRIAN: Yeah, Ed, and the tendency continues in the 20th century, or at least for much of the 20th century. We do things a little differently. We just sweep all of this stuff under the rug.

I mean, it’s pretty well known that Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy were all having affairs– Kennedy, lots of affairs. But we just, in the 20th century, swept those under the rug. It had become so commonplace to disaggregate a person’s personal behavior if they were a powerful man in politics.

All of that changes with the emergence of the feminist movement– really, the emergence of a second-wave feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. You have women making their case very effectively– and they’re joined by a lot of men– who say, look, power doesn’t just reside in the Oval Office or in the Supreme Court. Power is actually constituted in the relationships between men and women. And that’s where there’s real inequality.

ED: The political is personal here.

PETER: Right.

BRIAN: Exactly. The personal is political. And if we’re really going to understand politics, we need to follow power wherever it resides.

ED: Right.

PETER: hosts, I think Courtney’s really onto something. And if we look at the big picture, what we see is a double standard. And that double standard goes back to the Rachel Jackson case. Because what was really at stake there was Andrew Jackson’s wife and her status as a wife.

ED: That’s right.

PETER: And if you called that into question, then you are attacking him. Throwing mud at a woman is really besmirching the reputation of a guy. And Rachel, at least, had status. And the people were willing to support Andrew Jackson on this. This backfired on his opponents.

In the case of Maria Halpin, this is a woman without status. I think that’s the crucial thing. So no holds barred, you could say anything you want about her. Now maybe you can get at Grover Cleveland. But what is so apparent in retrospect is that the woman, as a woman, as a human individual with rights and with dignity, she doesn’t exist. And that’s what we have now in the wake of second-wave feminism.

BRIAN: So when powerful politicians prey on women sexually, this becomes not just something for the gossip columns, but something that is headline news and has everything to do with politics because it is about the imbalance of power between men and women.

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