Waving the bloody shirt
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In U.S. history, "waving the bloody shirt" refers to the demagogic practice of politicians referencing the blood of martyrs or heroes to inspire support or avoid criticism.
The phrase originated in post-bellum politicos using sectionalist animosities of the American Civil War to gain election in the postbellum North from the 1860s to 1880s. The phrase implied that members of the Democratic Party (which garnered much of their support from the "Solid South") were responsible for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the bloodshed of the war. Some candidates of the Republican Party as well a few candidates of other parties rivaling the Democratic Party used this notion to get elected to office, under the idea Democrats and Southerners are one and the same, and men should "vote as if they had shot".
The term "bloody shirt" can be traced back to the aftermath of the murder of the third Caliph, Uthman in 656 AD, when a bloody shirt and some hair alleged to be from his beard were used in what is widely regarded as a cynical ploy to gain support for revenge against opponents. It also appears in a scene in William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, in which Mark Antony waves Julius Caesar's toga to stir up the emotions of his fellow Romans. In American history, it gained popularity with an incident in which Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts, when making a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, held up the shirt of a carpetbagger whipped by the Ku Klux Klan[1].
More recent "bloody shirt" examples include:
- the former mayor of Washington, D.C. Marion Barry reminding voters that he "took a bullet for the city" while a city councilman in 1977;
- Jesse Jackson, whose shirt was literally bloodied as he held the body of Martin Luther King, Jr. after King was shot to death on a motel balcony in 1968;
- attempts by any number of war presidents to hide from criticism of their foreign policy decisions behind the "bloody shirts" of the soldiers who have died or are dying in such wars, e.g., the Viet Nam War or the wars in Iraq in 1990 to 1991 and the 2000s .
