Made In America - Bill Bryson [185]
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 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