BUZZWORDS
The Bug Stops Here
May Berenbaum
N
ineteenth-century Connecticut
editor and author Charles Dudley
Warner would probably be altogether forgotten today but for the fact that
he’s the one who first turned the phrase,
“Politics makes strange bedfellows,” one of
the English language’s most frequently
quoted and least often attributed pithy aphorisms. This timeless phrase first appeared in
an almost completely forgotten book on
gardening titled My Summer in a Garden.
Warner was moved to make his catchy statement upon reflection on his unlikely alliance
with Harriet Beecher Stowe—a woman with
whom he had little in common otherwise—
on the subject of abolition. Knowing what
he did about gardening and politics, then, I
suppose Warner wouldn’t have been as surprised as I was to see cicadas turn up in a
political advertisement.
With the massive emergence of Brood X
periodical cicadas in the Washington, D.C.,
area during the spring of 2004, I guess even
the most insect-averse Washington politico
couldn’t fail to notice them. By sheer force of
numbers, Brood X made an impact on the
cultural scene, drowning out weddings, clogging pool filters, appearing on t-shirts and
hats, showing up in stir-fries and in
smoothies by design as well as by accident,
and otherwise making their presence known
in America’s most political town. It was probably inevitable that they would blunder into
partisan politics. First to take metaphorical
advantage of the infestation was the Republican National Committee. On 14 May 2004,
at the height of the emergence, a video was
mailed to 700,000 registered Republications
from the RNC website (http://www.gop.com/
News/Read.aspx?ID=4192). A voice-over
narrator intoned,
Every 17 years, cicadas emerge, morph
out of their shell, and change their
appearance. The shells they leave
behind are the only evidence they were
here. Like a cicada, Senator Kerry
would like to shed his Senate career
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and morph into a fiscal conservative,
a centrist Democrat opposed to taxes,
strong on defense....But he leaves his
record behind….When the cicadas
emerge, they make a lot of noise. But
they always revert to form, before
disappearing again.
The voiceover accompanies a time-lapse
film of a cicada eclosing and expanding its
wings and ends with an animated cicada
morphing into John Kerry.
The Kerry campaign wasn’t overly bothered by the advertisement; in fact, a representative told a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter
that the campaign wasn’t “bugging out” over
the advertisement (adhering to the time-honored journalistic tradition of accompanying
news stories about insects with laborious
puns) and added, “Maybe, if given another
17 years, President Bush could create a job
in Ohio” (Gregory Korte, Cincinnati
Enquirer, 15 May 2004).
As an entomologist, I confess to being
slightly baffled by the use of insect imagery to
promote a political candidate. If I’m for Kerry,
does that mean I’m against cicadas? Are cicadas Republican or Democrat? Do other insects have party affiliations? As far as meta-
phorical metamorphic transformations go, I
don’t exactly get it, either—cicada nymph to
cicada adult is hardly the most dramatic to
come to mind. Were I picking campaign metaphors, I might have gone with just about any
holometabolous species over the periodical
cicada—say, grub to beetle, or maggot to fly;
there’s lots more metaphorical power there.
But then, maybe I just don’t know enough
about cicada-related political history. Even
though the Brood X emergence in the Baltimore–Washington area coincides with a
presidential election only every 68 years, since
the nation’s capital was moved there 19 July
1790, area Brood X cicadas have been destined to cross paths with politicians whenever they emerged. Gene Kritsky, noted cicada authority (and my editor here at American Entomologist), pointed out to a press
corps (who become interested in insects about
once every 17 years) that cicadas had had an
impact on presidential politics on at least one
other occasion. Back in 1902, then-President
Theodore Roosevelt was practically
drowned out while trying to give a Memorial Day speech defending national policy to
impose “orderly freedom” in the Philippines
(Morris 2002, Korte 2004).
AMERICAN ENTOMOLOGIST • Fall 2004
This is not to say that cicadas are the only
six-legged strange bedfellows of politicians.
Insects played a critical role in a presidential
election more than 100 years ago that was
almost as bitterly contested as the Bush–
Kerry election. In 1896, Republican William
McKinley faced Democrat William Jennings
Bryan and embroiled the nation in a dispute
over U.S. monetary policy—specifically,
whether gold or silver should serve as the
national standard. The Republicans adamantly opposed the free coinage of silver and
maintained that all coins and paper maintain parity with gold. For their part, Bryan
and the Democrats were unalterably opposed to monometallism and argued passionately for the free and unlimited coinage
of silver and gold (http://www.sfworlds.com/
linkworld/populist.html). It happened that,
three years earlier, an outfit called Whitehead
and Hoag filed a patent for what we now
call a campaign button (technically not a
button at all but rather more of a pin and
called a pinback button). For reasons lost to
history, both parties decided to display their
loyalty to their candidates with campaign
buttons shaped like insects. These pins, called
variously gold bugs or silver bugs, depending on party affiliation, weren’t true bugs at
all—some looked like bees and others like
stag beetles with misshapen mandibles. The
bugs were often bedecked with such stirring
slogans as “Bryan for the bug house” and
“How the farmer loves gold bugs,” demonstrating the venerability of the laborious-pun
tradition.
Pins from both parties often had photographs of the candidates and their running
mates (Adlai Stephenson in the case of Bryan
and Theodore Roosevelt in the case of
McKinley) on the wings of the bugs, which
folded up and popped out when the stinger
was pushed (http://oasis.harvard.edu/html/
hou00219.html)
Even-third party candidates got in on the
insect action in the 1896 election. Democrats
who disagreed with the party platform and
embraced the gold standard were known as
“gold bugs” or “gold Democrats.” They even
went so far as to have their own nominating
convention and put forward John M. Palmer,
a 79-year-old from Kentucky, as their candidate, who was ignominiously defeated (accompanied no doubt by a wash of ponderous insect-related puns in the press). (http://
www.learner.org/biographyofamerica/
prog17/feature/essay.html)
The 1896 election apparently began a
longstanding tradition of denoting unusual
political associations with insects. Moderate
Republicans in Congress from Northeastern or Midwestern urban states, for example,
have been known as gypsy moths ever since
a handful supported the impeachment of
AMERICAN ENTOMOLOGIST • Volume 50, Number 3
Richard Nixon in 1973. In contrast, conservative white Democrats from southern states
with agricultural constituencies have been
called Boll Weevils since the early 1980s,
when Representative Marvin Leath from the
11th district in Texas founded a conservative Democratic faction that allied with Republicans on tax and spending bills (http://
obits.com/leathmarvin.html). As evidence
that politics has indeed gotten uglier, it’s worth
noting that in neither case was the insect appellation chosen with affection.
It’s telling to note that insect-related political metaphors almost always seem to involve odd alliances, or strange bedfellows.
Maybe the general feeling is that the apparent incongruity of partnering insects with
politics symbolically conveys odd alliances.
But maybe people should look a little deeper
to find the underlying natural connections.
As Gore Vidal once pointedly noted, in a statement quoted far less often than that of Charles
Duncan Warner, “Politics is made up of two
words: ‘poli’ which is Greek for ‘many’, and
‘tics’, which are bloodsucking insects” (http:/
/quotes.prolix.nu/Politics/). Although the entomology leaves a lot to be desired, the etymology certainly has its merits.
Note: For more on partisan insect politics, see the Weekly World News, 12 November 1996, p. 32: “White House Overrun by
Rats & Roaches!…but pests only show up
for Democratic Presidents,” says puzzled
D.C. exterminator.”
References Cited
Hake, T. 1985. Encyclopedia of political buttons: United States 1896–1972 : Including
prices, campaign history, technical facts and
statistics/with 1998 revised price supplement.
Hake’s Americana and Collectibles, York, PA.
Korte, G. 2004. Email: Democrat morphs like
insect. Cincinnati Enquirer, 15 May 2004
(http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/05/
15/loc_cicadapolitics15.html).
Lieder, Frederick W.C. (Frederick William
Charles), 1881-1953. Frederick Lieder political button collection: Guide. MS Am 2333,
Houghton Library, Harvard College Library,
Harvard University, Cambridge, MS (http://
oasis.harvard.edu/html/hou00219.html).
Morris, E. 2001. Theodore Rex. New York, Modern Library.
May Berenbaum is a profes-
sor and head of the Department of Entomology, University of Illinois, 320
Morrill Hall, 505 South
Goodwin Avenue, Urbana,
IL 61801. Currently, she is
studying the chemical
aspects of interaction between herbivorous
insects and their hosts.
B
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Nov. 7-12, 2004
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