Circus bandwagon, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2009
15 May 2020
To climb on or jump on the bandwagon is to join what is believed will be the winning side in some endeavor. The phrase is moderately derisive; those who jump on the bandwagon are Johnny-come-latelys and fair-weather fans who join only when success is in the offing, if not assured.
Back when I lived in Washington, DC and was a daily reader of the Washington Post, sportswriter Tony Kornheiser would write of the city’s football team, the Redskins, as having a bandwagon of fans when they were winning. Here is an early example from 30 January 1983:
We are now witnessing what Robert Ludlum might call the Bandwagon Mosaic. I know it’s only a few hours before kickoff, but there’s still time to jump on the Washington Redskins’ bandwagon. Sure it’s crowded. You’re going to have to elbow your way past the television anchormen, the editorial writers, the politicians, the syndicated columnists—all the assorted bozos who recently learned the difference between quarterback sack and Dense Pack.
(For those who don’t remember the days of the Reagan-era Cold War, “Dense Pack” was a ludicrous idea that if a country packed its missile silos tightly together, incoming warheads would destroy each other, in what was dubbed “fratricide,” and the missiles on the ground would be protected.)
A bandwagon is originally literally that, a horse-drawn wagon that carries a band, often used to lead parades. Bandwagons were commonly used by circuses, which upon arrival in a town would parade the through the main street with the bandwagon at the fore as a means of advertising their presence. And indeed, the first records we have the word’s use is in reference to circuses. There is this from the American Quarterly, July 1849:
NIAGARA SUSPENSION BRIDGE.—The extensive circus and equestrian troupe of Col. Mann crossed the suspension bridge en route to Canada. The company occupied 22 horse teams, headed by the large four-horse band wagon, together with their baggage and paraphernalia.
And six years later P.T. Barnum included this in his autobiography:
At Vicksburg we sold all our land-conveyances, excepting four horses and the “band wagon;” bought the steamboat “Ceres” for $6000, hired the captain and crew, and proceeded down the river, stopping at desirable points to open our “budget of amusement.”
The earliest use of the metaphorical phrase that I have found is from the 14 June 1895 issue of the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader:
The Republican clubs of Oregon lately refused to declare for free silver and there is a great fight going on between Senator Mitchell and the Portland Oregonian to show whether they represented the Republican sentiment of the state. The clubs no doubt caught the drift of Republican sentiment in the country and determined to get on the bandwagon early.
But a year earlier there is this example of on the bandwagon plan from an article on a proposed Pan-American railway in the Detroit Free Press of 30 April 1894:
During the Harrison administration the bureau was conducted on the bandwagon plan. It made a great deal of music and was industriously paraded as the beginning of what might ultimately prove an all-America federation.
This usage could be a precursor of the phrase we know today, or it could be a one-off phrasing. In any case, it is a metaphor of sound and music that doesn’t amount to anything substantive.
Sources:
Barnum, P.T. The Life of P.T. Barnum. London: Sampson Low, Son, & Co., 1855.
Evening Argus-Leader, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 14 June 1895, 6.
Kornheiser, Tony, “Enjoy Yourself, It’s Lighter Than You Think.” Washington Post, 30 January 1983, F2.
“New Cape Horn Route.” Detroit Free Press, 30 April 1894, 1.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. band-wagon, n.
“Quarterly Chronicle.” American Quarterly Register and Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 1, Philadelphia, September 1849, 61.
Photo credit: Anonymous photographer, 2009, public domain image.