A wounded American soldier arrives at a triage station in France during World War I
22 May 2024
It is not uncommon for a grisly or shocking term to lose its impact over the years, to meliorate. Such is the situation with basket case. As the term is commonly used today, a basket case is someone who is under physical or, more usually, mental distress to the point where they can no longer function. It is also used to refer refers to a dysfunctional organization or situation. But the origins of the term are much more grim and rooted in the horrors of the First World War, or as we shall see, rooted in something of an urban legend that arose during that war.
As originally used, basket case denoted a quadruple amputee. With no arms or legs, the soldier was reduced to being carried around in and living life in a basket. The idea of basket cases arose despite the fact that apparently few, if any, soldiers in such a condition actually existed. The term starts appearing in print in 1919 in denials that such basket cases existed. Here is the earliest that I’ve found, a story in Ohio’s Cleveland Plain Dealer with a dateline of 17 January 1919 and published the following day:
For many weeks there have been rumors that wards of “basket cases”—soldier patients minus both arms as well as both legs—were in existence at this hospital.
[…]
There is not a single “basket case” in “debarkation No. 3” at the present time. And what is more, there has never been a basket case in any of its wards since they were first opened.
[…]
“Every day we have people come here and ask to see the ‘basket cases’,” said Capt. W. E. Lang. “They are well intentioned people who want to do something for these poor unfortunates, as they call them. I have the hardest time convincing them that we have no such cases. If they seem unwilling to believe me I give them the freedom of the hospital and let them search for themselves. We have not had a single basket case since the hospital has been in existence and a good many thousand cases have passed through its ward.
But gradually, as memories of the war faded, basket case lost its tinge of horror, and the figurative sense arose. Here is one, a comment on the division of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis that appeared in New Orleans’s Times-Picayune on 18 October 1938. While the subject is international politics, the allusion explicitly calls out the original meaning:
When the amputations are completed, it appears that Czechoslovakia will be, in hospital parlance, a “basket case”—with the Nazis furnishing the basket.
And by the next war, there is this column that appeared in the Oregonian on 26 October 1942 about comedian Jack Benny making a plea for people to donate their old cars for scrap metal to help the war effort:
Mr. Benny of Waukegan croaked his lines on the March of Time program while propped up in his hospital bed with a rag tied around his neck, and before somebody cut the mike cord throwing him off the air, Jack had given his faithful old friend, his Maxwell, to help out the scrap drive.
The line cut (probably caused by a new interne letting slip with his scalpel while treating an outpatient case) came just as Jack was warming up with a plea to other people to donate their favorite rolling stock too, too, no matter how much it hurts. Mr. Benny’s appeal was so eloquent, despite his bum larynx, that millions of listeners must have decided to turn in their heaps. In giving my own car, an old basket case, I make only one selfish stipulation, and that is that the sacrifice must be no greater than that suffered by Mr. Benny.
The point of the column is that despite Benny’s owning an old, broken-down Maxwell being a running gag in his radio show, he did not actually own a Maxwell car.
The original, amputee sense of basket case received new life during WWII, again despite such cases being vanishingly rare. But following the war, the figurative sense continued unabated. Here is an example from Life magazine of 16 February 1948:
The U.N. has decided that all Palestine should be divided into three parts—a Jewish state, an Arab state and an internationalized Jerusalem. But now we have to think about the problem harder than ever. For the “solution is shaky.”
The decision was the most important one in U.N. history. It was adopted by a two-thirds vote after long study and debate, and it had the backing of both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Will this unequivocal decision work? If not, the U.N. may become a more pathetic basket case than the old League of Nations after the Japanese nullified the decision on Manchuria. The setback to world peace might be equally profound.
Today, few who use the term are aware of its rather grim, albeit near-mythical, origin.
Sources:
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., basket, n.1.
Kitchen, Karl K. “Absurd Stories Without Basis: No ‘Basket Cases’ in Big New York Hospital, Correspondent Says” (17 January). Cleveland Plain Dealer (Ohio), 18 January 1919, 8/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Moyes, William. “Behind the Mike.” Oregonian (Portland), 26 October 1942, 9/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2014, s.v. basket case, n.
“The Palestine Problem.” Life, 16 February 1948, 34/1. Google Books.
Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 18 October 1938, 10/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Photo Credit: US Army Signal Corps, c.1918. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.