Made In America (55 page)

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 capturing 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 every 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.

Only in comparatively recent times, incidentally, has the White House become an unapproachable fortress. As late as
the Harding era (1921-3) the public was allowed to picnic on the White House lawn or even wander over and peer through the windows of the Oval Office.
¹⁴
Harding himself sometimes answered the White House front door.
¹⁵

And so to military matters.

There is an old joke that goes: ‘Dear Diary: Today the Hundred Years War started.’ The fact is that most wars didn’t get the name by which we know them until the nineteenth century. The American Revolution wasn’t normally called that until the nineteenth century. It was the
War for Independence,
or simply the
War with Britain.
The Civil War was at the time of its fighting more generally called the
War Between the States
by southerners and the
War of the Rebellion
by northerners. World War I for obvious reasons wasn’t so called until there was a World War II. (It was the
Great War.
)
World War II,
although the term was commonly applied, didn’t become official until the war was nearly over; Roosevelt didn’t like
either World War II
or
Second World War.
Throughout its early years, he called it – a trifle melodramatically – the
War for Survival,
then shortly before his death started referring to it as the
Tyrants’ War.
Other names that were commonly attached to it were
War of World Freedom, War of Liberation
and the
Anti-Nazi War.
In 1945, the question of a formal name was put to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. His choice,
World War II,
was formally adopted by President Truman.
¹⁶