We’d make life easier for ourselves—and more pleasant for everyone else—if we could learn to behave like respectful adults, even with the people whose ideology we abhor. But if you think American politics is nastier than ever, maybe you can take small comfort in knowing there’s nothing new under the sun.

Take, for instance, the 1910 elections in Maine. The state’s political machine had long been controlled by popular Sen. Eugene Hale, whose son Col. Frederick Hale was running for Congress. In a blistering editorial in his rural weekly, the Six Town Times, Charles Thornton Libby didn’t stop at criticizing the Hale politicians—he also took aim at the senator’s wife:

 “Mrs. Hale, daughter of the notorious Zach Chandler, and brought up from childhood in an atmosphere of the most unscrupulous political chicanery, has said to friends in Portland that Fred shall go to Congress no matter what it costs. In so doing she lays aside the garments of modesty which in New England protect womanhood from political asperities, and stands forth in all the hideousness of open corruption. Her vile purpose deprives her of all consideration due to her sex and leaves the community to fight for its honor against this political Amazon as best it may.”

Col. Hale was not pleased to see his mother characterized as an immodest political Amazon standing forth in the hideousness of open corruption. He said later that after giving the matter careful consideration, he decided violence was the only answer. Without revealing his purpose, he asked another journalist to arrange an introduction to Libby. When the editor rose from his seat and extended his hand, Hale produced the editorial.

“Are you responsible for that?” he asked.

“I am,” Libby answered.

Hale quickly pulled a whip from his coat. “Take that, you cur!” he shouted, as he rained blows on Libby’s shoulders. Other than shielding his face, Libby made no effort to defend himself. Hale then dropped the whip, delivered a single fist-punch, and announced: “This is what I do to anyone who insults my mother. Now you can do what you like.”

Libby passed on the offer, and Hale left unmolested. “I have no feeling against Col. Hale,” Libby told the New York Times. “A man who won’t stand up for his mother doesn’t amount to much.”

Libby kept his commitment not to report the incident in his own paper. But it didn’t matter. Times were changing. Not only did the younger Hale lose his race, but Sen. Hale was forced to resign as a new regime swept into power … temporarily.

Here are a few more examples of how political leaders past have sometimes forgotten their manners, but not necessarily their wit:

“The fight would last until someone gave up. It might be me, but I would at least have the opportunity to hit him in his big pretty mouth.”

—Former Florida Chief Justice Vassar B. Carlton, 65, reacting to insults from state Speaker of the House Donald Tucker, 42; reported in the Palm Beach Post, 1978

He is a “labor-baiting, poker-playing, whiskey-drinking, evil old man.”

—Union leader John L. Lewis speaking of Texas Rep. John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner, vice president under Franklin Delano Roosevelt from 1933–1941

“In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club—the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.”

—Spiro Agnew, vice president under Richard Nixon, speaking of Administration critics to the California state Republican convention in 1970. This famous phrasing was courtesy of legendary wordsmith William Safire, then a White House speechwriter.

“Fellow-citizens, he is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. Like rotten mackerel by moonlight, he shines and stinks.”

—John Randolph of Roanoke, early 19th-century congressman from Virginia, about Rep. Edward Livingston of Louisiana

“A taste for learning and cultivated friends, and a tendency to bathe frequently, cause in them the deepest suspicion.”

—President Theodore Roosevelt, 1901–1909, on the opposition Populist Party

“These snollygosters!”

—President Harry S Truman, 1945–1953, on critics of his foreign policy. Unfortunately, no one listening to Truman quite knew what a “snollygoster” was, beyond recognizing that it couldn’t be good. Someone finally discovered a definition in an 1895 edition of the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch: “A fellow who wants office regardless of party, platform, or principles and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknothical assumnacy.”