notes, documents, and dates from a lifetime of reading about the United States
Words I had to explain twice a semester
In no particular order, because that's how they came up. Some of these are one line and some got away from me; that is also how they came up. Touched up 6/8/21.
Every field has its shorthand, and history's shorthand is mostly insults that got printed often enough to become terminology. Half of this glossary began as a sneer by one faction at another, and if you know who was sneering at whom, the word usually explains itself. Words in bold inside an entry have their own entry somewhere on the page.
Carpetbagger
A Northerner who moved South during Reconstruction, allegedly carrying all his possessions in a carpetbag. The insinuation was that they were vultures and opportunists; the reality was mixed, like any cross-section of humanity. Teachers, doctors, and veterans of the Union army went south too, and some of them were precisely the people the newly enfranchised voters elected. The insult has outlived the facts by a hundred and fifty years and gets used today for any politician who moves districts for a job, which would have surprised the original sneerers considerably.
Scalawag
A white Southerner who cooperated with Reconstruction, i.e., the native-born partner of the carpetbagger. Of unknown origin; it had meant a runt or rogue for a couple of centuries before the 1860s gave it a job. The existence of a whole vocabulary for the crime of political cooperation tells you how Reconstruction ended: it was, in no small part, defeated by words first and then by worse.
Gerrymander
To draw an election district for political advantage. From Elbridge Gerry, governor of Massachusetts, who signed a redistricting bill in 1812 (I had 1813 here for two years; a sharp-eyed reader in Salem set me straight, and she was very nice about it) whose district in Essex County looked, to the cartoonist at the Boston Gazette, like a salamander. Gerry + salamander. The cartoon ran, the word stuck, and both major parties have been faithfully recommitting the offense ever since. Gerry also has the distinction of refusing to sign the Declaration of Independence and then helping to write it; a man of parts. The verb is now used as a four-letter word in polite company, which the Gazette would have found hilarious.
Jim Crow
The system of racial segregation that ruled the South from the 1890s to the 1960s. The name came first as a show: "Jump Jim Crow," a blackface song-and-dance routine performed by Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a white performer, from about 1830. Rice was the most famous comedian in America for a while, which tells you a great deal about America. By the 1840s "Jim Crow" was shorthand for Black Americans as caricatured by white performers, and by the 1890s it was the name of the laws themselves. Every time I teach it, someone asks whether the people naming the laws knew they were naming them after a minstrel joke. They did. That is the point.
Know-Nothings
The American Party of the 1850s, nativist, anti-immigrant, and especially anti-Catholic. Name from the instructions given to members: if asked about the organization, say "I know nothing." At their peak they won dozens of congressional seats and controlled Massachusetts, and then they broke apart over slavery like everything else in that decade (see the essay). Their presidential candidate in 1856, Millard Fillmore, carried one state, which is one more than most third parties manage.
Copperhead
A Northern Democrat who opposed the Civil War and wanted negotiated peace, named (by their enemies) for the snake that strikes without warning. Most were Midwesterners who called themselves Peace Democrats and considered the name libel; a few genuinely were what the word now means. The epithet worked, which is why it survived and "Peace Democrat" mostly didn't. War-time name-calling is a technology, and it improves under pressure.
Fire-eater
An outright pro-slavery secessionist, the hard core that had wanted out of the Union since the 1840s. William Lowndes Yancey, Robert Barnwell Rhett. The fire-eaters thought the 1850s compromise measures were betrayals, which is a useful corrective to the idea that everyone was reluctantly dragged into the war; a small group of men wanted it for twenty years and worked the levers until they got it. They are under-taught, which I say as a professional judgment.
Doughface
A Northerner, usually a Democrat, who voted with the South on slavery questions, before the war. Coined in 1817 (a John Randolph wisecrack about dough-faces who "melt" before Southern demands, though he may have lifted it; Randolph's coinages are disputed the way everything about Randolph is disputed). Later supplanted in vocabulary by copperhead, and then by words from our own era that I leave as an exercise.
Bourbon Democrat
Post-war conservative Democrat: pro-business, hard money, low tariffs, and (this being the South in the 1870s) no friend of Reconstruction. The name is from the French Bourbons, of whom it was said they learned nothing and forgot nothing. Cleveland was one, more or less, and so was a long line of governors. Not to be confused with the whiskey, though the confusion is understandable on a Friday night faculty colloquium.
Redeemer
The self-given name of the Southern politicians who "redeemed" their states from Reconstruction in the 1870s, restoring white Democratic rule. A word to watch anywhere you find it: people who name themselves redeemers are telling you how they want the story told. For what the redemption actually looked like on the ground, see Jim Crow, and the Reconstruction section of the Civil War page.
Solid South
The one-party Democratic South from the 1870s to roughly the 1960s. "Solid" as in a bloc, a wall, monolith; general elections in some counties went unrecorded because the Democratic primary was the real contest and the general election was theater. The phrase still gets used for any region that votes as a unit, but it was coined for that specific wall, and the wall did come down, over about thirty years, in a story too long for a glossary.
Sharecropping
The labor system that replaced slavery in the cotton South: the landowner supplies land, tools, and credit; the worker supplies labor; the crop is split. The farmer's half never quite covered the debts run up at the plantation store, by a coincidence of arithmetic that favored the man who owned the store. Slavery's replacement was better and far from good; "better and far from good" is a phrase I use in lecture a lot, and sharecropping is where I first learned to use it.
Homestead Act (1862)
160 acres of public land to any adult citizen (or intended citizen, including freed slaves after the 14th Amendment) who would farm it for five years. About 1.6 million homesteads in all, some of them still in the same families today. The catch: the good land near railroads went first and to the moneyed, 160 acres of High Plains semi-arid "farmland" was a gamble with the weather, and "any citizen" worked rather differently depending on who was enforcing the paperwork locally.
Exoduster
A Black migrant leaving the post-Reconstruction South for Kansas, in the movement of 1879 named for Exodus, which the migrants themselves chose; the naming is theirs, the dignity is theirs, and the "duster" half of the word is the plains. Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, a formerly enslaved carpenter and organizer, was called the father of the Exodus. One of the great under-taught stories; a room full of students who have never heard of it goes quiet at the right moment, which is how you know it belongs in the course.
Buffalo Soldier
Black soldier in the post-war regular army, mainly the 9th and 10th Cavalry on the plains. Name origin is genuinely uncertain (their Cheyenne opponents' term for them, or their winter coats, or their hair, take your pick; sources disagree). What is certain: they had the worst assignments, the worst postings, the lowest desertion rate in the army, and eighteen of them won the Medal of Honor in the Indian wars, a paradox I have assigned for discussion for thirty years, and every class eventually lands on the same conclusion, which is that a country can hand a man a rifle and withhold his rights, and he can serve anyway, for his own reasons, and both things are true at once.
Robber baron
The great industrialists of the Gilded Age, or the label hung on them by their critics: Carnegie in steel, Rockefeller in oil, Vanderbilt in railroads, Morgan in money. Half the term is accurate; a "baron" implies feudal illegitimacy, and "robber" accused them outright. The defense (they built the modern economy, consumers got cheaper kerosene and steel rails) and the prosecution (they bought legislatures, broke strikes with private armies and federal troops, and priced competitors into graves) are both documented, and I let students argue it with primary sources from both sides. The word remains the most efficient one-sentence syllabus in American history.
Gilded Age
The name for the 1870s-1890s: glittering surface, base metal underneath. Coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner as the title of an 1873 novel, which is the only time in the record I can find where a whole era got named by a joke and kept the name. (The joke was about the Gilded "Age," specifically the contrast with the golden ages of history.) Also useful for remembering the difference between gilded (thin gold over cheap metal) and golden (the real thing), a distinction the era itself made vividly and which I have put on a quiz.
Muckraker
Progressive-era investigative journalist: Ida Tarbell (Standard Oil), Lincoln Steffens (city machines), Upton Sinclair (meatpacking, though he was after the workers' story and the country obliged him by caring about the sausages). The label came from a Theodore Roosevelt speech in 1906 borrowing Bunyan's "man that could look no way but downwards, with a muckrake in his hand." TR meant it half as an insult and used it on his friends; like most of TR's inventions it did its work and became a compliment. Ida Tarbell is the one I tell students to read; her serial dissection of Standard Oil in McClure's, two years of it, brought down a monopoly and she never once raised her voice.
Yellow journalism
Sensationalist newspapering of the 1890s, Pulitzer's World against Hearst's Journal, named for the Yellow Kid, a comic character both papers ran at various times in their circulation war. Credited with helping start the Spanish-American War in 1898, which is a simplification, but a load-bearing one. "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war," Hearst is supposed to have said to a photographer, and the fact that it's probably apocryphal has never once stopped anyone from quoting it, including here.
Mugwump
A Republican who bolted the party to vote for the Democrat Cleveland in 1884, from the Algonquin word for "chief," the joke being that they sat on a fence with their "mug" on one side and their "wump" on the other. The mugwumps were mostly reformers, mostly elite, and were called everything; that many of them were right about the character of the man they opposed is noted for the record.
Spoils system
"To the victor belong the spoils," Senator William L. Marcy of New York, 1832, defending the rotation of federal jobs to the winning party's supporters. Jacksonian democracy in practice meant the postmaster's job changed hands with the presidency, and it worked about as badly as you'd expect, culminating in a murdered president (Garfield, shot in 1881 by a disappointed office-seeker) and the Pendleton Act of 1883, which created the civil-service exam and the modern (small-m) merit system. An underrated hinge in American history: the day the post office stopped being a prize.
Tammany Hall
The New York Democratic organization, 1789-1967, and the textbook example of the urban political machine. George Washington Plunkitt's distinction between "honest graft" and "dishonest graft," explained cheerfully from a shoeshine stand and preserved in a book every student should skim (Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, 1905): honest graft is seeing where the city's going to build a park and buying the land first. Boss Tweed ran it at its 1860s-70s peak and died in the Ludlow Street jail. Plunkitt's line "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em" is the entire machine in one sentence.
Doughboy
An American infantryman of World War I. Origin genuinely unknown, though theories abound (the pipe-clay belts that looked like dough when wet, adobe dust on border-service uniforms, the buttons on the uniform, or General Pershing's remark that they "rose" to every occasion, take your pick; the last is the funniest and the least likely, which is usually how it goes). By 1917 it meant the man in the trench; by 1942 the word had been retired for "G.I.", itself from "government issue," stamped on the gear, a nickname for a serial number, an irony that needs no gloss.
WPA
Works Progress Administration, 1935-1943, the New Deal's jobs program: eight million people employed building roads, courthouses, and, famously, everything else, including 2,500 murals, a thousand posters, the index-card catalogue of the folk-song archive (Alan Lomax's crew recording Lead Belly), and the guides to every state in the union, which still read well. Criticized at the time as "boondoggling" and "leaf-raking"; criticized since as the model of what government can do quickly and well when it decides to. The word "boondoggle" itself entered the language during those fights, from a Rochester boy scout's word for a braided leather lanyard, and that is the kind of sentence that gets me invited to fewer parties than I'd like.
Dust Bowl
The 1930s plains catastrophe, drought plus wheat-plus-plowing practices that stripped the topsoil and let it travel. "Dust Bowl" was coined on the spot by a reporter, Robert Geiger of the Associated Press, April 15, 1935, the day after Black Sunday, the worst storm of them all, and he said he was "too new to the plains" to know the word would stick. About 3.5 million people left the affected states in the decade, and the ones who stayed are the reason the shelterbelts and contour plowing got taught. Worster's Dust Bowl (1979) is the one to read; it makes the case that the disaster was economic before it was meteorological, and I believe it.
Contraband (of war)
Term of art in 1861: three enslaved men, Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend, rowed across to Fortress Monroe, Virginia, in May 1861 and presented themselves to Union General Benjamin Butler. They had been laboring on Confederate fortifications and their owner demanded them back under the Fugitive Slave Act. Butler, a lawyer, called them "contraband of war," property seized from the enemy in wartime, and refused to return them. He improvised the first crack in slavery's legal wall and he did it in a single stroke of label-making. The word spread through Union lines, "contrabands" came by the thousands, and Congress eventually ratified with law what Butler had done with a word.
Bread riots
April 2, 1863, Richmond: a crowd of hungry women, hundreds of them, most of them soldiers' wives, marched on the capital of the Confederacy with axes and knives and took bread and goods from the shops, shouting "Bread or blood." Militia were called out; the governor addressed the crowd; the mayor read the riot act and was ignored; the dispersed crowd was promised groceries at cost. The Confederacy's economy was dying of its own math (printing money, blockaded ports, a currency of promises), and the women of Richmond said so with axes, a year and a month before the men in the trenches got the final word.
Higher law
William H. Seward, March 11, 1850, on the Senate floor, arguing against the Fugitive Slave Act's compromise package: there is "a higher law than the Constitution." The phrase got him laughed at then and quoted ever since; it was the abolitionist position in five words. Seward went on to be Lincoln's secretary of state and bought Alaska two years after calling the Constitution second-best, a career that resists summarizing in one line and I have tried for decades.
Irrepressible conflict
Seward again, October 1858, a speech predicting that the United States would become "either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation." Politically unfortunate phrasing, quoted by secessionists as proof the North intended to destroy them, and the kind of prophecy that helps cause the thing it foresees. With Seward, as with most oracles, the interesting question is whether the words moved events or just named them in time to be blamed.
Popular sovereignty
Lewis Cass's solution, adopted by Stephen Douglas and built into the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854: let the settlers of each territory vote slavery up or down. Elegant, democratic, and catastrophic, because it nationalized the argument the Missouri Compromise had geographically contained, turned Kansas into two armed camps, and destroyed the Whig Party, which was the price nobody itemized on the bill. I use it in class as the purest example of a solution that assumes the problem is a misunderstanding.
Free Soil
The Free Soil Party, 1848, "Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men": opposed to slavery's expansion, not (at first, mostly) to slavery itself, and built out of anti-slavery Democrats, Whigs, and the Liberty Party. Their line about wanting land for free white farmers tells you the coalition's mixed motives, which the standard hagiography often launders out; the actual abolitionists noticed at the time. Martin Van Buren ran as their candidate and took 10 percent, which is what a brand-new party with a former president gets.
Freedmen's Bureau
The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865-1872: the first federal social-services agency, understaffed (the whole bureau peaked under a thousand agents for a million and a half people), chronically underfunded by a Congress that kept trying to kill it, and nonetheless responsible for the schools. By 1870 something like 4,000 schools; Fisk, Howard, Hampton among the institutions it seeded. Killed in 1872, vindicated by 1965; that gap is the tragedy of Reconstruction in one administrative history.
Cross of gold
The closing line of William Jennings Bryan's speech at the 1896 Democratic convention, arguing for free silver against the gold standard: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." The convention went insane; he got the nomination at thirty-six, the youngest major-party nominee ever; he lost the general election to McKinley, ran twice more, and ended his career on the wrong side of a Dayton, Tennessee courtroom in 1925, which is the kind of arc that makes a good final exam question.
Square Deal / New Deal / Fair Deal / Great Society / Silent Majority
The slogans, because a student asked me once for all of them in one place and I could not refuse. The Square Deal (Theodore Roosevelt, ~1903: conservation, trust-busting, meat inspection, arbitration of the coal strike); the New Deal (FDR, 1932 acceptance speech, tossed off as a phrase and then made into a governing program and an era); the Fair Deal (Truman, 1949, the New Deal's sequel, more of it blocked than passed); the Great Society (LBJ, Ann Arbor, May 1964); the Silent Majority (Nixon, November 1969, the speech where the center was declared spoken for). Slogans are load-bearing in this country's political architecture, and I have a shelf of books arguing they shouldn't be.
Kitchen cabinet
Andrew Jackson's informal advisors, the friends and editors he actually listened to, as opposed to the official cabinet. Coined by his enemies; "kitchen" implying something cooked up informally and maybe in bad taste. The first president to govern, in part, around his own constitutional cabinet, and therefore the first fight about what political advisors are for, a fight we are having still, so the word belongs here if any word does.
Writs of assistance
General search warrants, in effect blank checks for customs officers to search anywhere for smuggled goods. In the colonies from the 1750s; James Otis argued against them in Boston in 1761 in a speech John Adams called the moment "the child independence was then and there born." Otis lost the case and won the next two centuries of Fourth Amendment argument, and the writs are the reason the Fourth says "particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." The "particularly" is doing two hundred years of work in one word.
Additions, corrections, and arguments welcome; see the about page for the email. A reader in Texas has already written me three letters about "doughface," and I have enjoyed every one of them, and only conceded half the points.