Where Did the Phrase 'Grandfathered In' Come From?

Although the term 'grandfathered in' is applied in many situations today, it originally referred to laws about voting rights. Learn the history of this phrase in today's episode of BrainStuff.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
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

(00:25):
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

(00:47):
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,

(01:10):
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.

(01:31):
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

(01:54):
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,

(02:17):
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.

(02:41):
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

(03:04):
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

(03:27):
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

(03:50):
favorite shows.