Meaning
Out on the campaign trail delivering speeches to local audiences - the classic mode of American politics before radio and television, when a candidate literally stood on a tree stump in a clearing and talked to whoever had gathered. A stump speech is the stock address, polished by repetition, that a candidate gives town after town. Often faintly nostalgic now, evoking whistle-stop and fairground campaigning; the related stump speech is standard vocabulary for a candidate's set-piece address. Regional use: American English; understood in other Englishes.
Origin
In the early nineteenth century, before auditoriums, public-address systems, and teleprompters, the most common way for a frontier candidate to be heard was to stand on the most common object in a cleared landscape: the tree stump, that immovable remnant of the felled forest. The phrase was established slang early: a book of 1833, Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett of West Tennessee, refers to a candidate alluding to a rival's grin 'in a stump speech'. George Caleb Bingham's 1854 painting Stump Speaking shows the scene at full flower - the candidate on the stump, the crowd ranged below. The verb stumping followed, and the old sense of to stump, to baffle, is thought to derive from Middle English stumpen, to stumble, as if over a tree stump. The stump was democracy's open-air platform, and politicians have been on it ever since.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- out on the stump
- stumping
- take to the stump
Usage Examples
- The senator spent October on the stump, giving the same stump speech in eleven county seats.
- Candidates took to the stump with a passion this year, since the local fair still draws bigger crowds than any broadcast.
- His stump speech was so polished that hecklers could mouth the punchlines along with him.