Meaning
A politician's standard campaign speech, written once and delivered again and again, with only small local tweaks, at stop after stop on the campaign trail. The name preserves a frontier custom: before many American towns had halls or hustings, candidates rallied voters from the handiest rostrum going, the sawed-off stump of a tree. This entry covers the noun, the speech itself; the general campaign idiom is the sibling entry 'on the stump', and 'take to the stump' belongs there too. Stump also works as a verb: a candidate stumps for someone. Do not conflate with 'throw your hat into the ring' (entering a race) or 'sound bite' (a clipped excerpt of one). Regional use: United States origin; now chiefly US, also Canada and Australia.
Origin
American in origin, and literal before it was figurative. The earliest print of the phrase is the Georgia Journal of Milledgeville, 1 August 1810, mocking a candidate who addressed voters as 'gentlemen of the jury' (Grammarphobia, from the Georgia Historic Newspapers database) - an antedating of the OED's earliest evidence, a letter of 1820 by the Scottish traveller James Flint, printed in Letters From America (1822): 'The harangues are called stump-speeches, from the practice of candidates mounting the stumps of trees.' Stump orator and stump oratory were in the papers by the early 1800s, and Etymonline dates the verb sense, to go on a speaking tour, to 1838. George Caleb Bingham's painting Stump Speaking (1853-54) fixed the image for good, and press legend grew until reporters tagging a candidate's boilerplate needed a shorthand - Nelson Rockefeller's basic stump speech on 'the brotherhood of man, under the fatherhood of God' became famous enough for reporters to abbreviate it as BOMFOG (Wikipedia). There is no single coiner; this entry's sibling on the site, 'on the stump', covers the general campaign idiom.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- stump oratory
- stump speaker
- stump speeches
Usage Examples
- By the third week of the tour she could deliver the stump speech on autopilot, swapping in the name of each town's championship football team.
- Reporters who had sat through the stump speech a dozen times listened only for the one fresh sentence about the trade deal.
- His stump speech never ran past twenty minutes, a mercy he learned from watching rivals drone on from fairground platforms.