National Affairs: The Snollygosters

Monday, Sep. 15, 1952

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In a train-platform speech at Parkersburg, W. Va. last week, Harry Truman once again proved his speed in the catch-as-catch-can school of political debate. Full of fine indignation, the President labeled Republican opponents of his foreign policy as "these snollygosters."* Mr. Truman's tone left no doubt that a snollygoster was a low creature indeed, but few, if any, of his hearers knew what snollygoster meant. According to one austere authority, the word is "a lower grade of colloquialism." Of obscure origin, it was given classic definition in the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, which in 1895 reported. "A Georgia editor kindly explains that 'a snollygoster is a fellow who wants office regardless of party, platform or principles and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknothical assumnacy.' " How serious a charge "talknothical assumnacy" was, no one seemed equipped to explain.

^{*Russia's U.N. Delegate Jacob Malik, a connoisseur of
invective, promptly adopted snollygoster (mispronouncing it as
snollygaster). It is, said Malik sententiously, "a
difficult-to-trans-late English term" applicable to Secretary of State
Dean Acheson, both of the U.S. presidential nominees—and Harry Truman.
A familiar Russian phrase may be expanded to "bandits, warmongers,
profiteers and snollygosters."}