Anything for a Vote: Dirty Tricks, Cheap Shots, and October Surprises in U.S. Presidential Campaigns

By Joseph Cummins

An updated and illustrated compendium of mudslinging, character assassinations, and below-board election strategies from U.S. presidential politics throughout history!

Discover the “dirty tricks of the covert and the sleazy” in this giftable volume for American history buffs (New York Times Magazine).

Covering 225-plus years of smear campaigns, slanderous candidates, and bad behavior in American elections, this comprehensive history is the authoritative tour of political shade-throwing from George Washington to Barack Obama. You might think today’s politicians play rough—but history reveals that dirty tricks are as American as apple pie. Let the name-calling begin!
 
• 1836: Congressman Davy Crockett accuses candidate Martin Van Buren of secretly wearing women’s clothing: “He is laced up in corsets!”
• 1864: Candidate George McClellan describes his opponent, Abraham Lincoln, as “nothing more than a well-meaning baboon!”
• 1960: Former president Harry Truman advises voters that “if you vote for Richard Nixon, you ought to go to hell!”
 
Full of sleazy and shameless anecdotes from every presidential election in United States history, Anything for a Vote is a valuable reminder that history does repeat itself, lessons can be learned from the past (but usually aren’t), and our most famous presidents are not above reproach when it comes to the dirtiest game of all—political campaigning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781594745843

Joseph Cummins

Joseph Cummins is the author of numerous books, including Anything for a Vote: Dirty Tricks, Cheap Shots and October Surprises in U.S. Presidential Elections; A Bloody History of the World, which won the 2010 Our History Project Gold Medal Award; and the forthcoming Ten Tea Parties: Patriotic Protests That History Forgot. He lives in Maplewood, New Jersey, with his wife and daughter.

Reviews for Anything for a Vote

[navarre1963 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In this election year, it seemed fitting to read a book about presidential elections, especially dirty ones since 2016 is shaping up to be one of the ugliest in recent history. American politics has always been an ugly, eat your own kind of thing, especially presidential politics. Trump and his ilk are sadly only the most recent in a long line of loud-mouth, back-stabbing, mud-slinging presidential candidates.

[davidwineberg · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After George Washington, Who Could You Trust?There are too many of them, spread over too many years, to remember the details. So Anything For A Vote is a welcome compendium of the vicious comedy that is presidential elections. It is terrific to read the human side of the candidates, the personalities behind the party rhetoric, their tics, foibles and predilections. You learn what they were trying to hide, how they undermined their opponents, and how voters perceived them in the context of their times. It makes them into real human beings. Names that have been forgotten, and some that deserve to be, pepper the campaigns. The backroom antics, the dirty tricks, outright lies and backstabbing are all there for your enjoyment.Sleaze predominates, and Cummins provides a Sleaze-O-Meter before many of the elections, to give an advance clue as to how bad it became. Seven of them hit ten, mostly in the modern era, since Kennedy-Nixon. The negative campaigns of our time are nothing new. The mudslinging started with, or rather against, Thomas Jefferson, who ironically could appeal to any political stripe: “Are you prepared to see your dwellings in flames, female chastity violated, your children writhing on the pike? Great God of compassion and justice, shield my country from destruction.”Jefferson won anyway.For over a century, it was unseemly to campaign. Candidates literally stayed home, talked to reporters, and held court, but pressing the flesh and haranguing the crowd was frowned upon. Warren Harding was the first to invite Hollywood onto his front porch, so he could be photographed with film stars. It made him seem part of the scene rather than just a politician, and elections have never been without them since.This is not the first version of Anything For A Vote. It’s an ongoing franchise, updatable every decade with new stories provided courtesy of the tweedledum-tweedledee of the political parties. It’s a refresher course, an eye-roller and a laughfest all in one.David Wineberg