Congrats, Philanderers: Sexual Hijinks Won’t Slow Your Path to the White House

A history of sex in Presidential politics.

"As a 25-year-old bachelor, Thomas Jefferson assaulted his best friend’s wife who, according to one account, defended her virtue with a pair of scissors. A widower 20 years later, he began a long-term sexual relationship with the enslaved Sally Hemings when she was between 14 and 16, a relationship many today would consider rape, though at the time her race was the scandal. The tabloid press gleefully trumpeted the story during the 1804 election, but most voters didn’t care. Jefferson won re-election on a strong economy, low taxes, and the triumph of the Louisiana Purchase, with which he had doubled the size of the U.S. with a pen stroke.

Ten years before he ran for president in 1884, Grover Cleveland raped a virtuous widow, impregnated her, forcibly took their son from her and gave him up for adoption, and sent her against her will to an insane asylum. When, during the presidential campaign, his victim told her story to the press, Cleveland didn’t bother to deny it. His political opponents heckled him on stage and in the press with, “Ma! Ma! Where’s my Pa?”

Cleveland’s opponent, Republican nominee Richard Blaine, was known as both a faithful husband and a corrupt politician, having been accused of accepting bribes of some $2.5 million in today’s money while Speaker of the House. Cleveland, on the other hand, while mayor of Buffalo and governor of New York, had lowered taxes, cut bureaucratic red tape, and fought corruption. When a pastor asked, “Do the American people want a common libertine for their president?” the answer, as the election results proved, was yes, as long as he was financially honest."

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