In the history of the United States, "waving the bloody shirt" refers to the practice of politicians referencing the blood of martyrs or heroes to criticize opponents. In American history, the phrase gained popularity with a fictitious incident in which Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts, when making a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, allegedly held up a shirt stained with the blood of a carpetbagger whipped by the Ku Klux Klan. (While Butler did give a speech condemning the Klan, he never waved anyone's bloody shirt.)
The idea may be traced back to Julius Caesar's funeral in 44 B.C. when Mark Antony showed the toga to the crowd during his funeral oration, a scene which appears in William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, but the speech mostly occasioned bathos.
Southerners mocked Butler, using the fiction of his having "waved the bloody shirt" to dismiss KKK and other atrocities committed against freed slaves and Republicans. It also inspired the Southern Red Shirts.
Waving the bloody shirt also has been used to define someone who brings up a past injustice or mistreatment in history to justify or cover up an injustice being committed in the present.
Famous quotes containing the words bloody shirt, waving, bloody and/or shirt:
“But there is nothing which delights and terrifies our English Theatre so much as a Ghost, especially when he appears in a bloody Shirt. A Spectre has very often saved a Play, though he has done nothing but stalked across the Stage, or rose through a Cleft of it, and sunk again without speaking one Word.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
“Flushed with new life, the crowd flows back again:
And all is tangled talk and mazy motion—
Much like a waving field of golden grain,
Or a tempestuous ocean.
And thus they give the time, that Nature meant
For peaceful sleep and meditative snores,
To ceaseless din and mindless merriment
And waste of shoes and floors.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of the snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,—these are in the system, and our habits like theirs. You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity, expensive races,—race living at the expense of race.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)