A scout from Taiwan sporting a boondoggle
17 January 2024
A boondoggle is a useless task or a waste of money, especially a government project that has gone wrong. Widespread use of the term grew out of its use by Rochester, New York Boy Scouts to refer to a ring used to keep a scout’s neckerchief in place. But its ultimate origin is mysterious. It may be related to woggle, the British term for a scout’s neckerchief slide, or it may have developed independently.
We first see boondoggle in 1927 in relation to Rochester, New York scouts. But the earliest use is not in the sense of a neckerchief slide. Instead, boondoggle is used to mean a daunting and hopeless task. This first use is from the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle of 23 July 1927 in a story about how two scout leaders were tricked into a job of taking down tents after a local Chautauqua meeting that proved too much for any two individuals. The story appears on the scouting news page of the paper:
Came the street whereon the tents were pitched and both leaders gasped for breath when their eyes took in what lay before them. Nothing more less than a hugh [sic] oversized bulging Chatauqua tent, fully as big as they big top tents that circuses use and which are handled by scores of men, numberless tractors and an occasional elephant or two.
Both leaders looked at each other and the look of blithful interest faded to one of subdued terror and remorse. They hung their heads and a deep red flush spread over their sun burned necks This was too much. They had been tricked in a way that left nothing more to be desired. Boondoggle. This was terrible.
How this sense of boondoggle may have developed into that of a neckerchief slide is unknown. But years later, when boondoggle was entering the parlance as a term for a wasteful government project, a Rochester scoutmaster, Robert H. Link, came forward claiming to have coined the term. While his claim lacks supporting evidence, it is plausible. Link said he first used boondoggle in reference to his new-born son. A new father faced with the daunting task of raising a child seems to match that original sense of a huge task like that of two men alone taking down a huge Chautauqua tent. Link’s claim was first reported by the Buffalo Evening News of 8 April 1935:
Robert H. Link said today that he was the one who originated the word “boondoggle,” which caused an uproar in the New York city aldermanic hearing on unemployment relief last week.
Mr. Link said that when his son, Robert H. Jr. was born in 1926, the word popped into his head as soon as he saw the faintly squirming wrinkly infant. “Boondoggle,” said Mr. Link on that occasion and “Boondoggle” Robert H. Jr. has been ever since.
In 1929, when local Boy Scouts about to depart for a celebration in England, wanted a name for adornments of plaited thongs they had contrived, Mr. Link, a former Boy Scout, said boondoggle again, and the name stuck. The lanyards still are known as boondoggles.
In New York city, the relief workers were uncertain about the origin of boondoggle, except that it had something to do with the Western pioneers, perhaps ’49ers. “Gadget” was agreed upon as the best synonym.
A few months after the article about the Chautauqua tents boondoggle, the 4 December 1927 issue of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, mentions Boondoggle as the title of a local scout troop’s newsletter. So the term was clearly in common use by Rochester scouts by this point, although the meaning of boondoggle cannot be deduced from the newsletter’s title.
The Rochester paper on 12 May 1928 again makes mention of the word, but here it clearly refers to a neckerchief slide:
One hundred and fifty boys of Hubbell Boy Scout Troop 7 and Roosevelt Troop 16 voted it a banner occasion last evening when they entertained Buck Jones, cowboy rancher and movie hero, at dinner at the Central Presbyterian Church. As proof of their regard for Jones and the feats of his horse, Silver, the boys presented him the most distinctive insignia of the Rochester troop, a leather Boondoggle or whistle cord.
So far, all the known uses of boondoggle are in the context of Rochester Boy Scouts. But this would change in 1929. At the World Jamboree (a jamboree is a gathering of scouts) held in Birkenhead, England, a scout troop from Rochester presented the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) with a neckerchief slide. The presentation was widely reported. From Georgia’s Augusta Chronicle of 11 August 1929:
The Prince put the “boondoggle,” the feathered lanyard peculiar to the Rochester scouts which McInerney presented to him, around the scout’s neck,, [sic] saying, “You are a bully fellow,” as he passed on.
Boondoggle starts to become associated with wasteful government projects during the 1930s in Republican critiques of New Deal programs to give unemployed workers jobs. An investigation by the city of New York into waste in how federal relief money was being spent revealed that some of it was being spent teaching people how to make boondoggles. From Jersey City’s Jersey Journal of 5 April 1935 reporting on the investigation going on across the Hudson River:
The term “boondoggling,” mentioned in the probe of New York relief, continues to receive comment.
It was explained that New York relief officials applied the term to useful articles made out of wood or leather, such as ax handles, belts, holsters, knife sheaths, rope products and whips—manual products which require little mental effort.
In Wednesday’s testimony of the public hearing of the Aldermanic Committee to investigate relief, Robert C. Marshall, director of the practicum shop, caused much laughter among the committeemen, counsel and spectators when he mentioned “boondoggling.” Although pressed on all sides for a comprehensive definition of it, all he and his assistants could say was that it came into prominence with the gold hunters of 1849, who trekked to California. It probably originated earlier among the settlers of the Allegheny frontier.
The idea that boondoggles originated in the American West has no evidentiary support. It’s clearly a post-hoc attempt to find an origin. The word clearly originated among Rochester scouts.
In the next few months, boondoggle acquired the sense of a wasteful government project. We can see that sense develop in the newspaper reporting. From the Kansas City Times of 23 May 1935:
Well, well, here we are, being taught how to boondoggle by the government, the purpose of which originally was to protect the weak from the strong and to see that we had an orderly system that would give us a place in the civilized world.
We also have codes, but while among them is a diaper code, we take it that the government will permit a woman to boondoggle diapers for her kiddies out of flour sacks or old sheets.
We have a fiddle code, but it is allowable up to the present, at least, to boondoggle a violin out of a gourd or old cigar box.
It is a wonderful government. It plans a great battleship for an enemy nation to shoot at and at the same time tells you how to bring up your sow to be motherly, how to plant corn on the land that is better adapted to raising clover and clover on land that is find for tobacco, but the real humanity of the federal system becomes more apparent when it to teaches us to boondoggle, the hobby of the rich man and the necessity of the small householder.
And this use from Portland’s Sunday Oregonian of 23 June 1935, which uses it to refer to a fanciful and impossible task, that of standing a steamship on its end:
Disappointments persist. It was found that if stood on end the new French liner, “Normandie,” would still be topped by the Empire State building by several feet, so that boondoggle was abandoned. Then persons who hate the money devil secretly hoped the ship would be anchored at the foot of Wall street and the captain would forget to pull up anchor before he started back to France, but no such luck.
And by 25 June 1935, we see a clear use of boondoggle in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle to mean what the writer believed to be a wasteful government project, this time a railroad in Alaska:
The interest on the sum invested in the railroad plus the annual deficit would give every one in the Fairbanks district a dole of at least $1000 per year. This is the great boondoggle left to us as a heritage of the last Democratic Administration’s experiment in government ownership.
An alternative source for the American term may be the British scouting term woggle, also meaning a neckerchief slide. The Oxford English Dictionary has a citation of woggle from the 9 June 1923 Scout magazine, and that dictionary gives credit to Scoutmaster William Shankley for coining the term. Woggle may be variation on a nautical sense of toggle, which dates to the mid eighteenth century. A sailor’s toggle is a pin that is passed through a loop of rope or a link in a chain to keep it in place. But then again, maybe not. The American term could have developed independently.
To sum up, boondoggle was a 1920s coinage of scouts in Rochester, New York, and perhaps Robert H. Link in particular. It gained wider currency when it was revealed in 1935 that one New Deal-funded work project in New York City that included making boondoggles. The word was taken up by Republican critics of the New Deal and came to mean any government project considered by the user to be wasteful.
Sources:
Alexander, Tex. “People’s Safety Valve: Boondoggling in Alaska” (letter). San Francisco Chronicle, 25 June 1935, 10/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“‘Boon-Doggle’ Work Goes On.” Jersey Journal (Jersey City), 5 April 1935, 12/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Augusta Scouts at World Jamboree Will Long Reminisce on Experiences.” Augusta Chronicle (Georgia), 11 August 1929, C-5/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Buck Gets Boondoggle from Scout Admirers.” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle (New York), 12 May 1928, 17/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
“Glittering Gold May Be Gilt, Camp Pioneer Leaders Learn, After Industrial Excursion.” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle (New York), 23 July 1927, 26/2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. boondoggle, n., boondoggle, v.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. boondoggle, n. & v., toggle, n.; third edition, December 2016, s.v. woggle, n.
“Rochester Father Claims He Invented Term Boondoggle.” Buffalo Evening News, 8 April 1935, 3/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Rodemyre, Edgar. “Darn Clever, These Boondogglers.” Kansas City Times (Missouri), 23 May 1935, 18/6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Said in Few Words.” Sunday Oregonian (Portland), 23 June 1935, 10/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Scouts of Roosevelt Troop Plan Contest.” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle (New York), 4 December 1927, 15/7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Warren, Carl. “Boon Doggler Must Eat Too, Avers Wilgus.” Daily News (New York City), 5 April 1935, 3/5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Photo credit: Mori / Taiwan, Office of the President; Wikimedia Commons; licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.