Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain Stuff, Lauren bol Bomb. Here across the globe, language and history are inevitably intertwined. Linguistic origins are borrowed and transformed, and as society changes, new words or phrases are created to reflect the current cultural understanding. Some phrases and words simply morph into accepted usage, their origins forgotten or conveniently misplaced.
One such phrase, grandfathered in, has become common shorthand to mean that someone is exempt from following new rules or regulations. Although it may evoke the image of a gray haired gentleman let off the hook because of his age, the term arose from something far less innocent. A deeper look into the first use of the phrase reveals the political and racial climate in the United States during the late
nineteenth and early twentie centuries. A person or business is considered to be grandfathered in when they're exempt from new rules and can continue to operate under the existing set of regulations, and new rules will then only apply to future cases. Today, the term is widely used across various sectors, most notably in real estate and health insurance. But when the term was first coined in the eighteen nineties, it
referred to only one thing, voting rights. After the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified to the U. S Constitution in eighteen seventy, thus banning the infringement on a citizen's right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Some Southern states did not readily accept the ruling. Instead, they carefully crafted amendments on the state level that circumvented the federal decree in an attempt to prevent black Americans
from accessing polling stations. Since the basis of race could no longer be used, the state amendments imposed things like poll taxes and literacy tests. These limits were powerful. Close to of all voting age men were illiterate, a majority of whom were poor black men. But those taxes and
tests would also affect poor, illiterate white voters. Thus, a grandfather clause was added to allow an illiterate man to vote as long as he or his lineal ancestor, that is, his grandfather had been a registered voter before eighteen sixty seven, which was three years before the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. The clauses suppressed the vote along racial lines, but party
lines were at play too. At the time, most Black Americans were Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln, which then favored expansive government funded programs, and most whites were Democrats. The Democratic Party then favored curbing expansion of government power. Suppressing the vote served to keep power in the hands of the Democrats. The parties wound up switching their big government versus small government ideologies over the next sixty years or so, leading to the stance as we see today.
But that's a different episode. In nineteen fifteen, the state amendments and clauses were ruled nationally unconstitutional, but the poll taxes weren't eliminated nationally until the adoption of the Amendment in nineteen sixty four, and on the state level in ninety six with the Supreme Court's decision in Harper versus the Virginia Board of Elections that meant decades of continued voter suppression. The phrase grandfathered in is widely used today
without the connotation of disenfranchisement. But even as culture shifts, whether we're aware of it or not, language holds the power of our history, positive and negative. Today's episode was written by Katie Carmen and produced by Tyler Clang. For more in this and lots of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.