Dirty politics goes back a long ways in Uniontown
Donald Trump may have gone where no presidential candidate has ever gone: to the lower depths of electioneering — calling opponents liars, threatening lawsuits, disparaging a war hero and skewering the pope, a whole religion, and an entire nation.
And he regularly calls out the media, including, especially, women journalists.
It’s been said politics has never been so debased; that 2016 is the worst ever; and that our ancestors would have been shocked to see how low politicians have stooped.
Name-calling and gratuitous attacks just didn’t happen back in the day.
There’s one thing wrong with this: it’s not true; dirty politics -really dirty politics — is nothing new.
Here, torn from the pages, is one example.
William Crow was a Republican state senator from Uniontown when he ran for re-election in 1914, 102 years ago.
It was an age of “boss” rule, and Crow was one of the bosses. He was an establishment type, state GOP chairman and a colleague of the biggest boss of all in Pennsylvania politics, U.S. Senator Bois Penrose.
Crow was a big target for Democrats to shoot at, and they did, with gusto.
The Democratic attacks in the long ago campaign of 1914 were unrelenting. One of the milder charges was that Crow conspired with local coal and coke companies to throw men out of work, all in the interest of electing Republicans.
According to Democrats, Crow was responsible for the growing cocaine traffic and the proliferation of speakeasies in Uniontown.
He was charged with the “wholesale padding” of voter registration rolls. The racist Democratic press — the parties had their own newspapers in those days — said Crow was responsible for making sure that a “white man’s vote” wasn’t “worth a continental.”
The most sensational charge against Crow was that he was responsible for a fatal car accident early one October morning in 1914 on Fayette Street, when a speeding B&O train plowed into an automobile, tearing the vehicle in half, killing two and injuring two others.
What made the crash unforgivable, Democrats said, was that this was not the first fatalityat the same spot — accidents had occurred in 1895, 1898 and 1905. The 1905 car-train collision claimed the life of Judge John J. Ewing.
So how did Crow figure in? Because he opposed, in the state legislature, designating Uniontown a third-class city, city council lacked the authority to install a railroad crossing gate on Fayette Street, Democrats argued.
As a result of Crow, “no other municipality in the state has a more rotten borough government,” Democrats raged. “The responsibility for yesterday’s awful accident is not upon the borough or upon the railroad — it rests on the shoulders of Sen. William E. Crow.”
Later that fall, Theodore Roosevelt campaigned in Uniontown for the Progressive party candidate for the U.S. Senate, Gifford Pinchot.
The former Republican president, speaking at the corner of Morgantown and South streets, lambasted “Penroism” and “Crowism” as the two worst political evils in Pennsylvania.
“I hope you repay Crow by beating him,” TR implored.
It didn’t happen. Both Penrose and Crow won. Republicans were elated, Democrats deflated, and Roosevelt soon changed parties, again.
It was, apparently, an era much like our own. Two years removed from the campaign of 1914, during the presidential canvas of 1916, this was heard from a famous Democrat of the day, Josephus Daniels, “No campaign in the history of the country has been quite so marked by viciousness, bitterness and invective.
“All the elements of hate and misrepresentation were brought into play.”
It all sounds so familiar.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.