By Sharon Oliver
Contributing Writer
BOSTON – These days, you would be hard-pressed to find someone who has not heard of one state after another threatening to bring the manipulating strategy of gerrymandering into play. What some may not know is how this practice, which is considered a corrupt way of drawing district lines in favor of a particular political party, got its name. Merriam-Webster describes gerrymandering as “the practice of dividing or arranging a territorial unit into election districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage in elections.”
Governor signed bill
The term is a portmanteau of Elbridge Gerry, the fifth vice president of the United States and a salamander. Gerry, who was governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander.
Known as the “Brusque Maverick,” Georgia delegate William Pierce described Gerry as a “gentleman in principles and manners” known both for his “integrity and perseverance and for being a “hesitating and laborious speaker” who talked at length “without respect for elegance or flower of diction.”
The Marblehead native was also a founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence but while the “wild-eyed” Gerry did refuse to sign the Constitution, claiming it had gotten the balance of power between states and the national government wrong. He successfully argued for Congress’ power to override presidential vetoes.
While governor, Gerry signed the redistricting bill in 1812 with reluctance, according to his son-in-law and biographer James T. Austin. In “The Life of Elbridge Gerry,” Austin wrote, “He urged to his friends’ strong arguments against its policy as well as its effects. … He hesitated to give it his signature and meditated to return it to the legislature with his objections.” The redrawn state senate district in Massachusetts stretched from near Boston to the New Hampshire border, and sliced up Essex County, a political stronghold for the Federalist Party. The reshaped district elected three Democratic-Republicans that year, breaking up the county’s previous delegation of five Federalist senators.
Term likely originated at dinner party
According to an 1892 article by historian John Ward Dean, the word “gerrymander” was coined at a Boston dinner party hosted in March 1812 by a prominent Federalist. When conversations focused on the detested redistricting bill, illustrator Elkanah Tisdale drew a picture map of the district as if it were a monster, with claws and a snake-like head on its long neck. One dinner guest remarked that it looked like a salamander. Poet Richard Alsop, who often collaborated with Tisdale, suggested it resembled a “Gerry-mander” instead. Another, yet less credible, version of the term’s origin credited painter Gilbert Stuart, famed portraitist of George Washington, with drawing the monster on a visit to a newspaper office.
Tisdale’s illustration headlined “The Gerry-mander,” appeared in the March 26, 1812, edition of the Boston Gazette with a fanciful satire joke about the beast having been born in the extreme heat of partisan anger. It had the caption: “Many fiery ebullitions of party spirit, many explosions of democratic wrath and fulminations of gubernatorial vengeance within the year past.”
The word gerrymander gained popularity by the 1820s but was not entered in Webster’s Dictionary until 1864. According to H. L. Mencken’s book “The American Language,” the reason for it not being added earlier may have been due to Noah Webster’s family friendship with Elbridge Gerry’s widow. Gerry died in 1814, two years after signing the bill.
Massachusetts is not alone when it comes to odd-looking gerrymandered maps. Ohio has its “Lake Erie Monster” and Pennsylvanians have to live with “Goofy Kicking Donald Duck,” but the Massachusetts “Gerry-mander” map may be the most freakish looking of them all.
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