by Bill Bryson
Finally, before we put the world of sports behind us, note should be taken of the recent controversy over the offensiveness of many team nicknames to American Indians. In 1992, a movement called the National Coalition on Racism in Sports and the Media was formed, partly to protest against the use of nicknames like Braves, Redskins, and Indians. In the view of Clyde Bellecourt, director of the American Indian Movement, ‘calling the team the Washington Redskins is like calling them the Washington Negroes or the Washington Blackskins’.42
In defence of Cleveland Indians, it has been noted that the team name actually commemorates a Native American, Louis F. ‘Alex’ Sockalexis, a Penobscot Indian who had been one of the team’s star players in the 1890s and for whom the Cleveland Indians named themselves in 1914, the year after his death. But the argument doesn’t wash with some activists. As one put it, ‘In that case, they should call themselves the Cleveland Sockalexises.’
A few colleges and high schools have changed their team nicknames from Mohawks or Hurons to something more innocuous and less emotive, and one newspaper, The Oregonian of Portland, announced in 1992 that it would no longer publish Indian-related nicknames, explaining that they tended to ‘perpetuate stereotypes that damage the dignity and self-respect of many people in our society’.43
At the time of writing, however, no professional team was seriously contemplating a name change.
17
Of Bombs and Bunkum: Politics and War
I
When, in about 1820, a Congressman named Felix Walker was accused of speaking drivel – which, evidently, he was – he replied that he was speaking to the people of Buncombe County, North Carolina, his district. Almost immediately his congressional colleagues began referring to any political claptrap as speaking to Buncombe. Soon the phrase had spread beyond Washington and was being abbreviated to buncombe, often re-spelled bunkum, and eventually was further contracted to bunk. Debunk, a back-formation, came later still, in 1927. Bunkum in turn begat hokum – a blend of hocus and bunkum. Thus with a single fatuous utterance the forgotten Felix Walker managed to inspire half a page of dictionary entries.1 In doing so, Walker touched on a central paradox of American political rhetoric – namely, that while politicians may mostly spout hot air (in its metaphorical sense an Americanism of the 1840s), they also constantly refresh the language.
A few American political terms have considerable venerability. Caucus, from an Algonquian word for counsellor, dates from the early seventeenth century, and as such is one of the oldest of surviving Americanisms. Mugwump (at first often spelled mugquomp), another Algonquianism, followed soon after, making its first recorded appearance in 1643. For two hundred years it retained its original sense of a chief or leader before abruptly shifting in the 1880s to describe a political maverick. (The oft quoted definition is that a mugwump is someone who sits with his mug on one side of the fence and his wump on the other.) Favourite son was first used of Washington as far back as 1789 and administration was coined by him soon after.
But the golden age of American political terminology was the nineteenth century. Of the perhaps two hundred terms that gained some measure of currency in that tumultuous century, a good number were sufficiently useful to be still with us today, among them spoils system, lobbyist, split ticket, party ticket, dyed-in-the-wool, office seeker, dark horse, lame duck, slate, standard-bearer, gag rule, straw vote, party machine, filibuster, slush fund, gubernatorial, junket in the sense of a trip at government expense, bandwagon in the sense of a movement or fashion to climb aboard, landslide for a victory, to dodge the issue, to electioneer, to campaign, to gerrymander, to be in cahoots with, to logroll, to stump, to run, to muckrake, to mend fences, to whitewash, and to keep the ball rolling (so said because in the 1840 presidential campaign a ten-foot leather ball bearing that slogan was rolled from town to town in support of William Henry Harrison).2
One of the first of these terms to enter common parlance was gerrymander. Meaning to redraw electoral boundaries to favour a particular party, it dates from 1812 and was named for Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry (shortly to become Vice-President under James Madison), whose Jeffersonian party engaged in some audacious cartographic manipulations to preserve its grip on the state assembly. Noticing that one district in Essex County had a vaguely reptilian shape, the artist Gilbert Stuart sketched on a head and legs and called it a salamander. ‘No, a gerrymander!’ cried an onlooker, and the term stuck. A small, overlooked aspect of the term is that we all mispronounce it. Gerry spoke his name with the hard g of Gertrude rather than the soft g of Gerald.3
In the following decade two other durable political terms arose, both in the New York state capital, Albany. One was spoils system, inspired by the expression ‘to the victor belong the spoils’, which has a nice classical ring to it but in fact was first uttered by an otherwise forgotten New York legislator named William E. Marcy.4 Also in Albany at about the same time arose the much-needed term lobbyist for someone who hung around the capitol lobby seeking favours of passing legislators. (They hung around the lobby because they weren’t allowed into the legislative chambers.)
Several other terms were borrowed from abroad. The custom of describing politicians as belonging to the left, right or centre of prevailing political sentiment came into American usage in about 1840 from Britain, though the British had in turn borrowed it from France, where it originated in 1789 as a by-product of the revolution. The terms reflect the seating arrangements of the French National Assembly, where it was customary for the more radical commoners to sit to the left of the President while the more conservative clergy and nobility filled the seats to the right. In neither Britain nor America did the terms reflect actual seating arrangements, but they proved convenient labels.5
Also from Britain came dark horse and lame duck, though neither had a political significance before America got its hands on them. Dark horse was coined by Benjamin Disraeli in his novel The Young Duke (1831). Though he was a politician himself, he meant it only in a horse-racing context. In America by the 1860s it was being extended to the political sphere. Lame duck originated in the eighteenth century as a London stock market term for a defaulter. It reached America with that sense around 1800, but by mid-century had been usurped by politicians to describe someone serving out a term of office and awaiting the arrival of his successor. In its political sense the term was reintroduced to Britain from America, but there it took on, and has retained, the sense of a politician who is incompetent, powerless or weak.
The oddest and certainly the most historically complicated foreign borrowing is filibuster. It began as the Dutch vrijbuiter, a pirate. To English speakers vrijbuiter naturally yielded freebooter. *31 But vrijbuiter was beyond the command of Spanish tongues. They converted the word to filibustero. The French then borrowed it as filibustier. From one of these, or both, the English reborrowed it as filibuster. Thus by 1585 vrijbuiter had given English two words with the same meaning. Freebooter went no further, but filibuster had a busy career ahead of it in American politics. First, still bearing something of its original sense, it came to describe Americans who formed private armies with a view to taking over Central American countries, for which there was a short but persistent fashion in the 1850s (the idea of manifest destiny rather going to some people’s heads).
One of these hopeful militants was a character named William Walker. Born in 1824 in Tennessee, Walker was an extraordinary prodigy. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Nashville at the age of just fourteen, and by the time he was twenty-five he had qualified as both a doctor and a lawyer, and somehow had also found time to edit a newspaper in New Orleans, take part in the California gold rush and engage in three duels, all of which becomes slightly more remarkable when you realize that he was also very small – little larger than a modern jockey. Despite his diminutive dimensions, Walker was clearly a leader of men. In 1853 he raised and armed forty-five recruits and set off with them for Baja California with the aim of captu
ring its mineral resources and simultaneously endowing its people with the benefits of American civilization, whether they wanted it or not.
The enterprise failed, but Walker had found his calling. Over the next seven years he divided his time between raising armies and finance, and sallying forth on a series of increasingly ambitious expeditions. Though he had some successes – he took over Nicaragua for about a year – ultimately each foray ended in defeat.
Finally in 1860, after a rout in Honduras, Walker surrendered to the British navy. To his astonishment, his captors did not repatriate him to America as had always happened before, but turned him over to the Honduran authorities, who promptly took him and his co-conspirators to a town square, lined them up before a firing-squad and brought to a close their lives and the fashion for private revolutions.6 Filibuster, however, did not die with them. By the mid-1850s it was being used in Congress to describe any vaguely disruptive debating tactic, and by the 1880s had settled into its present sense of a wilful delaying action designed to thwart the passage of a bill.
Still other words might have filtered out into the world at large except that Congress in its early days was remarkably unforthcoming about its doings. Senate debates were kept secret until 1794, and reported only sketchily after that for several decades. The House of Representatives attracted more attention, partly because it was more open in its dealings but also because well into the nineteenth century it was regarded as the more prestigious chamber. Not until well into the nineteenth century did the Senate begin to take on an air of pre-eminence, for the simple reason that the House, reflecting the growth of American population, began to become very crowded – by 1860 it had 243 members, by 1880 332 – while the Senate remained comparatively compact and thus more exclusive and clubby. The men who made the Senate famous – Daniel Webster, Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun – would very probably have been in the House had they been born a generation earlier.7
At all events, the public enjoyed no right of access to congressional debates until as late as 1873, when the Congressional Record was at last created. Contrary to common belief, the Record even now does not constitute a full, verbatim transcription of all the debates in Congress. Speeches are frequently edited before being placed in the Record, and indeed the Record sometimes contains speeches that were never given at all. It has, in the words of Daniel Boorstin, ‘no more than the faintest resemblance to what is actually said’ in Congress.8
The nineteenth century also marked a busy time for political parties as alliances endlessly formed and reformed, often around a single issue like slavery or immigration. Political parties in America effectively date from the period immediately after the drafting of the Constitution, when the two main sides formed into loose associations. Those in favour of the Constitution pulled off something of a linguistic coup by dubbing themselves Federalists. In fact, the term would more accurately have described those who were against the Constitution and wished to revive the Articles of Confederation. Deprived of the term, this faction became known by default as the Antifederalists, which was not only inaccurate but had a negative ring to it that the more positive-sounding Federalists were delighted to exploit.9 Saddled with a misleading name, the Antifederalists began, confusingly, sometimes to call themselves Democrats, sometimes Republicans, and sometimes Democrat-Republicans.10
A succession of party names briefly blazed and faded in the nineteenth century, like matches struck in a darkened auditorium – a not inapt metaphor since that is how one of the more memorably known parties got its name. I refer to the Equal Rights Democrats, who were known to everyone as the Loco-Focos, and so called because when one of their meeting halls was plunged into darkness by saboteurs the adherents continued with the aid of the new sulphur matches called locofocos.11 No less memorable were the Know-Nothings – not the sort of name that would seem to inspire confidence in their capacity to lead. Officially called the American Party, it was as much a secret society as a political body and got its name from the reply members were instructed to give when asked to elucidate the party’s aims: ‘I know nothing.’ Despite the obvious shortcomings of trying to attract a national following when you won’t tell the world what you are up to, the Know-Nothings proved immensely popular among anti-immigrant, anti-Irish and anti-Catholic zealots, and for a time threatened to overtake the young Republican Party as a lasting political force in America.12
Among the other parties or sub-parties that passed through the busy scene that was the 1800s were the Buttenders, Roarers, Huge Paws, Copperheads, Ringtails, Ball-rollers, Barnburners, Anti-Masons, Free Soilers, Anti-Nebraskans, Anti-Renters, Pro-Bank Democrats, Constitutional Union Party and People’s Party – though many of these appellations, it should be noted, were bestowed by antagonists and weren’t necessarily used by the adherents themselves.
The watershed year for political parties was 1836 when two sides coalesced into pro – and anti-Andrew Jackson factions. The pro-Jacksonites styled themselves Democrats. On the anti side, National Republicans, Anti-Masons and Pro-Bank Democrats rallied to the resuscitated name Whigs – a decidedly odd choice since during the Revolutionary War whig had designated a person who supported the British cause, and thus had long had a whiff of treachery about it. Despite its long-standing currency in both Britain and America, Whig is of mysterious origins. The Oxford English Dictionary says only that it ‘probably’ comes from Whiggamores, a term applied to the members of a military expedition against Scottish insurgents in Edinburgh in 1648, but no explanation as to the source of Whiggamores is adduced.
The Jackson Democrats remained Democrats after 1836, but the Whigs had further turmoil, and eventual dissolution, to face. In the 1850s the party splintered into an unhappy plethora of factions with names like the Conscience Whigs (those who were against slavery), the Cotton Whigs (those who were for), and the Barnburners (from a comic parable about an obstinate Dutch farmer who rid his barn of rats by burning it down). In 1855, the Whigs emerged from this internecine squabbling as Republicans, and thus have they remained. The respective symbols of the two main political parties – the elephant for the Republicans, the donkey for the Democrats – were the creation of Thomas Nast, the cartoonist who also gave human form to Uncle Sam.13
In this century, new political terms have been fewer in number, but no less resourceful. Among those that have arisen in the world of politics since 1900 and found a role in the wider world are smoke-filled room, grass roots, pork barrel, square deal, new deal, keynote speech, off the record, egghead, brain trust and countless, mostly short-lived words ending in – gate: Koreagate, Lancegate, nannygate, Quakergate, Hollywoodgate and Irangate, all of course inspired by Watergate. Even Britain has had its Camillagate.
Pork barrel had its roots in the 1800s. Throughout that century pork was a common political shorthand term for any kind of dubious abundance (it evidently alluded to the fattiness of pork). Early in this century, for reasons unknown, the term grew into pork barrel, and became particularly associated with federal largesse that a Congressman or Congresswoman managed to bring back to his or her home state.
Off the record was coined by the New York politician Al Smith in 1926. Egghead arose during the 1952 election campaign. It appears to have been inspired by Adlai Stevenson, or more precisely by Stevenson’s dome-like pate, and by late in the year was in common currency as a flip synonym for an intellectual.
The century has also seen any number of slogans and catchphrases emanate from political circles, from Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’, to Woodrow Wilson’s ‘little group of wilful men’ and ‘to make the world safe for democracy’, to Coolidge’s ‘the business of America is business’, to Truman’s ‘the buck stops here’, to Kennedy’s ‘ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’. Some much quoted twentieth-century political phrases are actually mythical, however. Hoover never said ‘prosperity is just around the corner’, and he never used the expression ‘a chicken in eve
ry pot’ – though the Republican Party almost did in advertisements for him during the campaign of 1928. It headed its ads with ‘A Chicken for Every Pot’, though even it acknowledged in the text that the expression was already old enough to be considered ‘proverbial’.
One Washington term that has existed officially only since the early years of this century is, surprisingly, White House. On the original plans, the building was described only as ‘the Palace’. No one knows when people started calling it the White House – but, oddly, it appears to have been before it was painted white. From 1800, when John Adams became its first resident, to 1814, when the British ransacked and partly burned it, the building was of unadorned grey Virginia freestone. Only after the British had vandalized it was the decision taken to paint it white to cover the smoke stains. So it is a little odd that people were calling it the White House as early as 1810. In any case, the name didn’t become official until Theodore Roosevelt began printing it on the executive mansion stationery sometime after 1901.
