To back and fill, a phrase taken from the terminology of sailors, began to be used of elusive candidates for office in the 50s. Ballot-box stuffer is traced by the DAE to 1856, bluff (as a political device) to 1854, to bolt to 1833 and bolter to 1858, bugaboo (in the political sense) to 1835, in cahoots to 1829, to crawfish to 1848, to demagogue to 1850,1 to dodge the issue to 1846, dyed-in-the-wool to 1830, to electioneer to 1806 (electioneering goes back to 1787), exposé to 1830,2 fat salary to 1817, fat office to 1833 and fat job to c. 1861, favorite son to 1825, floater to 1847, grand and lofty tumbling (by a politician) to 1839, to knife to 1888, landslide to 1895, lobby to 1808, lobbying to 1832 and lobbyist to 1863 (it was preceded by lobbyer, 1841),1 log-rolling to 1820, mass-meeting to 1842, office-hunter to 1806, office-seeker to 1813 and office-holder to 1818, party question to 1803, party machinery to 1829, party ticket to 1843, party vote to 1846 and party hack to 1848, platform (in the sense of a formal document) to 1848, plank to the same year, on the fence to 1828, to mend fences to 1879,2 pap to 1841, peanut politics to 1887, picayune (in the political sense) to 1837, pie to 1879 and pie-counter to 1912, plum to 1887,3 plunder (in the political sense) to 1870,4 love-feast to 1893, pollywog (a professional politician; now obsolete) to 1854, pow-wow (a meeting of politicians) to 1812, pull to 1887, reformer (nearly always in a derogatory sense) to 1848, ring to 1862, safe (meaning not radical) to 1862, scattering (of votes) to 1766, to scratch a ticket to 1841,5 to see (to bribe) to 1869, slangwhanger (a political ranter) to 1807, solid South to 1878,6 slate to 1865, to be snowed under to 1880, sorehead to 1855, spellbinder to 1888,7 split ticket to 1836, standard-bearer to 1848, straight ticket to 1860, straw-vote to 1891, to swing round the circle to 1877, third party to 1801, tidal wave to 1877,1 timber (e.g., presidential, gubernatorial) to 1831, propaganda (in the evil sense) to 1880 and propagandist to 1824, rabble-rouser (perhaps borrowed from England) to 1843, repeater to 1861, to go (or row) up Salt River to 1832,2 stalwart to 1879, spoils to 1812, spoils system to 1838 and spoilsman to 1846, stump to 1816, to stump to 1838, to take to the stump to 1852, stumping-excursion to 1844 and stumping-tour to 1900, to whitewash to 1800 and wirepuller to 1833. Fat cat, a wealthy contributor to campaign funds, was coined by Frank R. Kent of the Baltimore Sun, and was first used in his book, “Political Behavior,” 1928.
It will be noted that most of these terms are opprobrious. Ever since the first great battle between Federalists and anti-Federalists the American people have viewed politicians with suspicion, and the word itself has a derogatory significance in the United States which it lacks in England. From Shakespeare onward, to be sure, there have been Englishmen who have sneered at the politician, but the term is still used across the water in a perfectly respectful manner to indicate a more or less dignified statesmen. In this country it means only a party manipulator, a member of a professionally dishonest and dishonorable class. An honest politician is regarded as a sort of marvel, comparable to a calf with five legs, and the news that one has appeared is commonly received with derision. Thus Walt Whitman described the men who constituted the fateful Democratic conventions of the years just before the Civil War, when problems of the first magnitude were pressing for solution:
[They] were, seven-eighths of them, the meanest kind of bawling and blowing office-holders, office-seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men, custom-house clerks, contractors, kept-editors, spaniels well trained to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels, disunionists, terrorists, mail-riflers, slave-catchers, pushers of slavery, creatures of the President, creatures of would-be Presidents, spies, bribers, compromisers, lobbyers, spongers, ruined sports, expelled gamblers, policy-backers, monte-dealers, duellists, carriers of concealed weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarred inside with vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people’s money and harlots’ money, twisted together; crawling, serpentine men; the lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth.1
The public attitude reveals itself in a common definition of politics, to wit, “Who gets what, when, how?” It is assumed as a matter of course that a professional politician will do anything, say anything or endure anything for votes, and that assumption is seldom controverted by plausible evidence. From the earliest days of the Republic its politics have consisted mainly of a continuing auction sale, with pressure groups of voters offering their votes and gangs of politicians bidding for them with public money. Nearly all the campaign slogans in American history, from the pledges to the veterans of the Revolution down through the “Vote yourself a farm” of 1846 and the “Share the wealth” of Huey Long to the grandiose promises of the New Deal have voiced engagements to loot A for the use and benefit of B.2 And in the popular proverbs aimed at or ascribed to politicians there is a matter-of-fact acceptance of the theory that they are wholly vicious, e.g., “In politics a man must learn to rise above principle,” “Root, hog, or die,” “You tickle me and I’ll tickle you,” “To the victor belongs the spoils,” “Few die and none resign,” “When the water reaches the upper deck, follow the rats,” and “Why not me?” These blistering sayings, like American proverbs in general, still lack scholarly investigation. There is an exhaustive and extremely valuable study of English proverbs,3 and there are others of the proverbs of other nations, including several useful catch-alls,1 but American proverbs continue to be neglected, though some of them are extraordinarily pungent, e.g., “Don’t monkey with the buzz-saw,”2 “I’d rather have them say ‘There he goes’ than ‘Here he lies,’ ” “It will never get well if you pick it,” “No check-ee, no shirt-ee,” “Cheer up; the worst is yet to come,” and “Life is one damn thing after another.”3
Some of the older political Americanisms have long engaged etymologists, e.g., caucus, buncombe, mugwump, gerrymander, roorback, scalawag and filibuster. Caucus was first discussed by the Rev. William Gordon, an English clergyman who immigrated to Massachusetts in 1770, took the side of the colonists in the Revolution, and on his return to England in 1786 wrote a four-volume “History of the Rise and Independence of the United States, Including the Late War.”4 In the first volume of this work he printed the following note on the term:
The word caucus and its derivative, caucusing, are often used in Boston. The last answers much to what we style parliamenteering or electioneering. All my repeated applications to different gentlemen have not furnished me with a satisfactory account of caucus. It seems to mean a number of persons, whether more or less, met together to consult upon adopting and prosecuting some scheme of policy for carrying a favorite point. The word is not of novel invention. More than fifty years ago1 Mr. Samuel Adams’s father and twenty others, one or two from the north end of town, where all the ship-business is carried on, used to meet, make a caucus, and lay their plan for introducing certain persons into places of trust and power. When they had settled it they separated, and used each their particular influence within his own circle. He and his friends would furnish themselves with ballots, including the names of the parties fixed upon, which they distributed on the days of election. By acting in concert, together with a careful and extensive distribution of ballots, they generally carried the elections to their own mind. In like manner it was that Mr. Samuel Adams first became a representative for Boston.2
“From the above remarks of Dr. Gordon,” said John Pickering in his Vocabulary of 1816, “it should seem that these meetings were first held in a part of Boston where ‘all the ship-business was carried on,’ and I had therefore thought it not improbable that caucus might be a corruption of caulkers, the word meetings being understood. I was afterward informed by a friend in Salem that the late Judge Oliver3 often mentioned this as the origin of the word; and upon further inquiry I find other gentlemen have heard the same in Boston, where the word was first used. I think I have sometimes heard the expression, a caucus meeting, i.e., a caulkers’ meeting. It need hardly be remarked that this cant word and its derivatives are never used in good writing.” This etymology was cited without di
ssent by Robley Dunglison in the vocabulary of Americanisms that he contributed to the Virginia Literary Museum in 1829, and Bartlett apparently accepted it in his Glossary, 1848, but the Webster American Dictionary of 1852, edited by the lexicographer’s son-in-law, Chauncey A. Goodrich, said that “the origin of the word is not ascertained.” In 1872 Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, an early authority on the Indian languages, suggested in the Proceedings of the American Philological Association that caucus may have been derived from an Algonquin word, caucauasu, meaning one who advises. This surmise was adopted by the later Webster Dictionaries1 and, as we have seen in Chapter III, Section 1, by Dr. Alexander F. Chamberlain, a high authority upon loans from the Indian languages, but the NED, the C volume of which came out in 1893, was content to mark the word “origin obscure.” The DAE says that the Indian etymology is “more plausible” than Pickering’s, but calls attention to the possibility that the word may be derived from the name of a forgotten Boston neighborhood, and cites in evidence thereof a notice in the Boston Evening Post of August 19, 1745, to the effect that a “general meeting” of “lay brethren, to take into serious consideration the conduct of those reverend clergymen who have encouraged the itineration of Mr. George Whitefield” was to be held “at West-Corcus in Boston.” Finally, the Standard Dictionary, 1906, notes that there was a Latin word, caucus, signifying a drinking vessel, and observes darkly that “the caucus club perhaps had convivial features.”
Thus the matter stood when, in 1943, Dr. LeRoy C. Barret, of Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., announced an interesting discovery.2 Let him tell it in his own words:
In looking over some old documents in the library of the American Oriental Society I found among the papers of John Pickering3 an explanation of the origin of caucus to the effect that it consists of the initials of the names of six men, viz.: Cooper (Wm.), Adams, Urann (Joyce, Jr.), Coulson, Urann, Symmes. The words are in a vertical column with the initial letters spaced a little bit away from the second letters. Below the column of names is written (in Pickering’s handwriting): “From B. Russell, who had it from Sam’l Adams and Paul Revere.”
The library of the American Oriental Society, of which Pickering was a founder and the first president (1842), is housed in the building of the Yale library. The name Urann seemed strange and could not be found in any American reference book, but Barret made a diligent search for it and soon unearthed it. His report on it follows:
In the New England Genealogical Register, Vol. 64, pp. 7–17, I found an account of a family named Urann (sometimes spelled Urine, et al). On p. 16 is entered the record that Thomas Urann, born in Boston, February 3, 1723, was a ship-joiner and prominent in town affairs, and held offices. He was a captain of artificers in Col. Richard Gridley’s artificers. He was a Mason, was one of the Sons of Liberty, and was at the Tea Party.1
The B. Russell mentioned by Pickering was apparently Benjamin Russell (1761–1845), an early American journalist who, after service in the Revolution, established a semi-weekly journal, the Columbian Centinel, which he continued to edit for forty years.2 One of the frequent contributors to it was Pickering, and the two were on close terms, for both were ardent Federalists.3 But journalists are notoriously unreliable as philologians, and Russell may have reported as horse’s-mouth information what he got from Adams and Revere only at second-hand. There is, furthermore, an unhappy tendency among amateur etymologists to derive words from the initials of proper names, often without justification. The case of cabal is in point. It is often said to come from the names of the five ministers of Charles II who made an alliance with France for war against Holland in 1672, to wit, Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale, but the NED shows that the word was in use so early as 1646–7, and was actually borrowed from the French cabale, of precisely the same meaning. The Russell memorandum could not have reached Pickering before 1816, for he does not mention it in his Vocabulary of that year. By that time, if Gordon is to be believed, caucus was nearly a century old. Also, his evidence conflicts with the fact that the Thomas Urann unearthed by Barret was not born until 1723, which would have made him much too young to be a member of the first caucus. The etymology of the word thus remains in doubt. It was spelled variously down to the Revolutionary era, but afterward the present spelling seems to have been agreed upon.
In the United States caucus has always meant a meeting of politicians to pick candidates, agree upon plans of action, and so on. The congressional caucuses of the major parties dictated the nominations of presidential and vice-presidential candidates from 1804 to 1824, and were finally overthrown only by the adoption of the revolutionary national convention system in 1831.1 Caucuses are still held by congressmen whenever a pending question calls for united party action, but they now deal with measures predominantly, and only occasionally with men. So in the State legislatures and in other theoretically deliberative bodies. The early English commentators on American speechways denounced caucus as a low and uncouth word, and their view of it was reflected, as we have seen, by the subservient Pickering, but it was already in respectable usage by 1762, and John Adams was using it soon afterward. The English, after a century of resistance, adopted the word in the 1870s, and, as the NED shows, perverted its meaning. “In American use,” says the NED, “a caucus is a meeting; English newspapers apply the caucus to an organization or system. Such organizations have been, in one form or another, adopted by all parties; and caucus is now a term which partisans fling at the organizations of their opponents, and disclaim for their own.” In other words, the English use caucus in the sense of what we call a party organization or machine.2 But in late years they have also begun to use it, albeit somewhat gingerly, in the original American sense. Indeed, they were so using it more than a decade before the date of the first English example cited by the NED. It had appeared in “Alice in Wonderland” in 1865,3 and in 1867 Every Saturday of Boston4 reprinted a note from Notes and Queries (London) saying that the London Times had twice used it to designate a palaver of politicians at the home of W. E. Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer and just turned Liberal. The Notes and Queries correspondent objected to the use of the term on the ground that the meeting was not secret, but only showed thereby a misunderstanding of its meaning, for an American caucus, though it usually goes on behind closed doors is not necessarily secret. “Caucus,” added this Englishman, “is by no means a pretty, much less a desirable word, to be added to our national vocabulary,” but it was already on its way into English usage.
The date of the introduction of buncombe remains undetermined. A writer in Niles’ Register in 18271 said that “talking to Bunkum” was already “an old and common saying at Washington,” but neither bunkum or buncombe has been found at an earlier date and neither is recorded again until 1841. Bunkum, in its early days, seems to have had the additional meaning, as an adjective, of excellent.2 The origin of the noun is thus given in John H. Wheeler’s “Historical Sketches of North Carolina,”3 quoted by Bartlett (second edition, 1859):
Several years ago, in Congress, the member from this district [i.e., the one including Buncombe county, of which Asheville is the county-seat] arose to address the House, without any extraordinary powers, in manner or matter, to interest the audience. Many members left the hall. Very naïvely he told those who remained that they might go too: he should speak for some time, but “he was only talking for Buncombe.”4
The New International Encyclopedia5 says that this occurred during the Sixteenth Congress, 1819–21 and that the hon. gentleman’s theme was the Missouri question.6 Why the spelling Bunkum should have arisen I do not know. It is possible, of course, that the name of the North Carolina county was originally spelled Bunkum, but on that point I am aware of no evidence. The English, who prefer bunkum to buncombe, began to use the term about 1850, but they have stoutly resisted bunk, and to debunk arouses their indignation.7 The American comic poet, John G. Saxe (1816–87), used bunkum in his poem, “Progress,” in 1846. The verb to bunco
mbe appeared in 1855, but it seems to have been assimilated in the course of time to to bunco, an entirely different word. To bunco is traced by the DAE to 1875 and bunco-steerer to the same year. The modern short form to bunk, and its derivative to debunk, are not listed, though bunk, a bed, and a number of its derivatives are.
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