On February 24, two days before Muskie was scheduled to campaign in Manchester, New Hampshire, William Loeb’s right-wing newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader, had published an anti-Muskie editorial on its front page. Titled “Senator Muskie Insults Franco-Americans,” it accused Muskie of hypocrisy for supporting blacks while condoning the term “Canucks”—a derogatory name for Americans of French-Canadian ancestry, tens of thousands of whom were New Hampshire voters. The “evidence” was a semi-literate letter ostensibly mailed to Loeb from Deerfield Beach, Florida, and published in the Union Leader the same day as the editorial. The signer claimed that a Muskie campaign aide at a Fort Lauderdale meeting had said that “we don’t have blacks but we have Cannocks” (sic), and the Senator reportedly concurred laughingly, saying, “Come to New England and see.” The Muskie campaign had contended that the letter was a fake, and had undertaken an investigation but failed to find the author.
