[lit-ideas] Whig 'n' Tory
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2012 18:35:22 -0400 (EDT)
From online source,
"in part perhaps a disparaging use of whigg "a country bumpkin" (1640s).
But mainly a shortened form of "Whiggamore" (1649), one of the adherents
of the Presbyterian cause in western Scotland who marched on Edinburgh in
1648 to oppose Charles I.
Perhaps originally "a horse drover," from dialectal verb whig "to urge
forward" + mare.
-- but then perhaps not.
In 1689 "whig" was first used in reference to members of the British
political party that opposed the Tories.
The American Revolution sense of "colonist who opposes Crown policies" is
from 1768 ('not that old, compared to other words' -- J. M. Geary).
Later, 'whig' was applied to opponents of Andrew Jackson (as early as
1825), and taken as the name of a political party (1834) that merged into the
Republican Party in 1854-56.
In the spring of 1834 Jackson's opponents adopted the name "whig",
traditional term for critics of executive usurpations.
James Watson Webb, editor of the New York Courier and Enquirer, encouraged
use of the name.
Henry Clay gave it national currency in a speech on April 14, 1834,
likening "the whigs of the present day" to those who had resisted George III,
and
by summer it was official.
I took this from Daniel Walker Howe, "What Hath God Wrought," 2007, p.390.
The complex phrase, "whig historian" is recorded from 1924.
Whig history is "the tendency in many historians ... to emphasise certain
principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the
ratification if not the glorification of the present.
Herbert Butterfield, "The Whig Interpretation of History," 1931.
-- or, as D. Ritchie prefers, 'whig'
>>a synonym for "wrong."
Cheers,
Speranza
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