Image: Cubist Room, International Exhibition of Modern Art, Chicago 1913
6 March 2024
As commonly used today, a lunatic fringe is an extremist minority in a movement or group. But that’s not its original meaning. The earliest uses of the phrase deprecatingly refer to a woman’s hairstyle, one where the hair is cut straight across the forehead, that is to say, in bangs. The phrase appears in the 1870s as part of a cluster of similar terms for bangs, including idiot fringe and convict style. From these, the underlying metaphor is clear. The hairstyle was called that because they resembled the haircuts given to those who were institutionalized.
The political use of lunatic fringe to denote an extremist group crops up shortly after the name of the hairstyle became popular, but then disappears from published sources until it is reintroduced and popularized in 1913 by Theodore Roosevelt. Whether this political usage remained in slang use in the intervening decades, not seeing the light of publication, or if Roosevelt recoined the term is uncertain.
The phrase idiot fringe first appears in the pages of the London Daily News on 15 March 1873, and the article was reprinted in a number of papers in the United States in the weeks that followed:
Indeed, a great many ideas have been borrowed from that opera [i.e., La Coupe du Roi de Thule] by Paris modistes and hair-dressers, who not unfrequently do up ladies of a respectable age to imitate “the syrens of the Coral Cave.” One of the insensate things decidedly out of date is “the idiot fringe.” Those who wish to limit their foreheads to the depth of the eyebrow should make use of curling-irons, and keep the Roman Empresses in their heads.
And we see convict style alongside idiot fringe in Vermont’s St. Albans Daily Messenger of 26 April 1873:
“Convict style” and “idiot fringe” are the appropriate and suggestive names applied to two of the present styles of arranging the front hair.
And lunatic fringe itself appears twice in a short story, titled Four Days, published in February 1874:
“Was that why you studied so hard all winter, and wouldn’t go to singing-school, you sly thing?” said Lizzie, eyebrows and lunatic fringe almost meeting again.
We see lunatic fringe used in relation to politics in the midst of the hotly contested Tilden-Hayes presidential election of 1876. A letter published in Connecticut’s Daily Constitution of 26 July 1876, and reprinted in papers across the country, has the following. In this passage lunatic fringe is still literally denoting the hairstyle, but it’s also being associated with extreme political positions, in particular the Ku Klux Klan, which the letter-writer claims has engineered the nomination of Tilden against the wishes of the Democratic rank and file:
“Lunatic fringe,” is the term applied now-a-days to the short cropped hair so often seen dangling on a lady’s forehead. But Tilden with a “hard-money” label dangling on his breast, a “soft-money” label on his back, with “reform” painted on his forehead, “free schools” swinging from one ear, for the Protestant “church schools,” and from the other for the Catholic, with one hand filled with “pudding-tickets” to make the illegal vote of New York City overcome the honest vote of the State, and other had filled with stolen Western town and county railroad subscriptions, is the most be-“fringed” spectacle now on exhibition.
But I have been unable to find any other non-coiffure-related uses of lunatic fringe until 29 March 1913, when Theodore Roosevelt published a disparaging review of the seminal, and therefore controversial, International Exhibition of Modern Art, held at the 69th Regimental Armory in New York City from February to March of that year, and therefore popularly labeled as the Armory Show. The show, which would subsequently move on to Chicago and Boston included artists such as Cassatt, Cézanne, Degas, Delacroix, Duchamp, Gauguin, van Gogh, Kandinsky, Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Matisse, Monet, Munch, Picasso, Renoir, Rodin, Seurat, and Whistler, among others.
Roosevelt wrote of the exhibit:
Probably in any reform movement, any progressive movement, in any field of life, the penalty for avoiding the commonplace is a liability to extravagance. It is vitally necessary to move forward and to shake off the dead hand, often the fossilized dead hand, of the reactionaries; and yet we have to face the fact that there is apt to be a lunatic fringe among the votaries of any forward movement. In this recent art exhibition the lunatic fringe was fully in evidence, especially in the rooms devoted to the Cubists and the Futurists, or Near-Impressionists.
We don’t know if Roosevelt put into print a slang term that was common, but unpublished, at the time or if he recalled its use from the days of his youth, but the combination of avant-garde art and a titan of American politics proved irresistible, and his comment was reprinted in papers across the country and entered American political parlance for good. We see it starting to appear, independent of quotations of Roosevelt, the following month, when this appears in the 20 April 1913 edition of the Duluth News Tribune:
Every new movement has its “lunatic fringe;” the more important and vital the subject the more pronounced this fringe. This is inevitable. In common parlance these effervescent, vociferous extremists are known to politics as demagogues, men who talk more than they think.
Roosevelt would use the phrase again a few months later in the context of politics. From Portland’s Oregonian of 12 October 1913:
As I have already said, there is a lunatic fringe to every reform movement. At least nine-tenths of all the sincere reformists supported me; but the ultra-pacifists, the so-called anti-imperialists, or anti-militarists, or peace-at-any-price men, preferred Croker to me.
I suspect there are political uses of lunatic fringe between 1876 and 1913 that have yet to be found. As more old newspapers are digitized and as more smaller databases are explored, such uses may very well appear. But until then the question of whether Roosevelt recoined the expression or if he simply brought a slang usage into the mainstream cannot be decided.
Sources:
“Fashionable Frivolities in Paris.” London Daily News, 15 March 1873, 5/7. NewspaperArchive.com.
“In General.” St. Albans Daily Messenger (Vermont), 26 April 1873, 1/6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
May, Sophie. “Four Days.” Oliver Optic’s Magazine, February 1874, 140–43 at 142/1 and 143/1. Google Books. (The OED has this same citation as coming from the magazine Our Boys and Girls of the same date.)
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, July 2023, s.v. lunatic fringe, n. and adj.; November 2010, s.v. idiot fring, n.
“Our Washington Letter” (26 July 1876). Daily Constitution (Middletown, Connecticut), 29 July 1876, 2/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Roosevelt, Theodore. “Colonel Roosevelt Turns the Spotlight of Reminiscence on the N.Y. Governorship.” Oregonian (Portland), 12 October 1913, 6/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Roosevelt, Theodore. “A Layman’s View of an Art Exhibition.” The Outlook, 29 March 1913, 718–20 at 719/1. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Solvent Insanity.” Duluth News Tribune (Minnesota), 20 April 1913, 6/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Tréguer, Pascal. “‘Idiot Fringe’: Meanings and Origin.” Wordhistories.net, 31 August 2023.
———. “‘Lunatic Fringe’: Meanings and Origin.” Wordhistories.net, 1 September 2023.
Image credit: Anonymous photographer, 1913. Wikimedia Commons. Art Institute of Chicago. Public domain photo.