Meaning:
To jump on the bandwagon is to join a movement or activity after it’s becoming increasingly popular. For example, rooting for a sports team one wouldn’t normally back as it starts to win more games.
Background:
This origin story comes in two parts. The first is the history of the word “bandwagon.”
Showman and entrepreneur Phineas T. Barnum (better known as the circus owner P.T. Barnum) is credited with many famous quotes and phrases that are popular even today:
Without promotion something terrible happens... Nothing!
The noblest art is that of making others happy.
I don't care what you say about me, just spell my name right.
Never attempt to catch a whale with a minnow.
He’s responsible for the popularity of the word “
jumbo,” too. While it existed as a little-used slang term as early as 1823, his employment of it as a name for one of his most enormous elephants associated the word with items that are super-sized. It’s his marketing campaign advertising the beast that caused jumbo to enter the common lexicon.
At the time Barnum’s circuses were popular, it was common to announce them and drum up business by holding parades throughout the town (this was obviously before permits were needed for such things). One vital part of this procession was the
bandwagon – literally the wagon on which the band members rode through the city while playing their instruments. The first appearance of the word appears in his 1855 autobiography:
The Life of P.T. Barnum, written by himself, where he writes “At Vicksburg we sold all our land conveyances excepting four horses and the ‘band wagon’.”
By the late 19th century, politicians had adopted this method of self-promotion. They’d obtain an elaborately decorated wagon and hire a band to draw attention, which they’d pull through town to a public area. The politician would then give his “
stump speech” from the wagon to those present. (The stump speech was so-called because before the days of the bandwagon, the candidate would deliver his platform from atop a tree stump.)
No one knows which politician first invited his backers to join him by inviting them to jump on his bandwagon, but by the 1890s it was a common phrase specific to politics; one showed one’s allegiance by literally jumping on the bandwagon. The phrase gradually morphed from a physical act to a metaphorical one by the end of the century.
Theodore Roosevelt referenced the practice in his
Letters, 1899 (published 1951): “When I once became sure of one majority they tumbled over each other to get aboard the band wagon.”
More recently, psychologists have recognized what they refer to as the “
bandwagon effect” (also known as the “contagion effect”): [A] general cultural phenomenon or bias in which the rate at which the spread of ideas, behaviour, and trends more generally, rises with the rate of others adopting the trend.” An example occurred during the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020. People started falsely believing toilet paper would be in short supply, so purchasing snowballed, thereby creating an actual shortage.
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