22 August 2022
Everyone “knows” that loose cannon is a bit of nautical slang dating back to the age of sail. A loose cannon careering about on the deck of a ship would be quite dangerous, but there is virtually no evidence of sailors ever referring to such a danger. And indeed, the phrase did not enter into common use until the 1970s, in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s use of the term. Rather, while the underlying metaphor is indeed a nautical one, the phrase has a literary origin, invented by Victor Hugo a century before Nixon’s use of it. The French novelist writes about just such a dangerous piece of ordnance in his 1874 Quatrevingt-Treize, which was translated into English that same year by Frank Lee Benedict:
Une des caronades de la batterie, une pièce de vingt-quatre, s’était détachée.
Ceci est le plus redoutable peut-être des événements de mer. Rien de plus terrible ne peut arriver à un navire de guerre au large et en pleine marche.
Un canon qui casse son amarre devient brusquement on ne sait quelle bête surnaturelle. C’est une machine qui se transforme en un monstre. Cette masse court sur ses roues, a des mouvements de bille de billard, penche avec le roulis, plonge avec le tangage, va, vient, s’arrête, paraît méditer, reprend sa course, traverse comme une flèche le navire d’un bout à l’autre, pirouette, se dérobe, s’évade, se cabre, heurte, ébrèche, tue, extermine. C’est un bélier qui bat à sa fantaisie une muraille. Ajoutez ceci: le bélier est de fer, la muraille est de bois. C'est l’entrée en liberté de la matière; on dirait que cet esclave éternel se venge; il semble que la méchanceté qui est dans ce que nous appelons les objets inertes sorte et éclate tout à coup; cela a l’air de perdre patience et de prendre une étrange revanche obscure; rien de plus inexorable que la colère de l’inanimé. Ce bloc forcené a les sauts de la panthère, la lourdeur de l’éléphant, l’agilité de la souris, l’opiniâtreté de la cognée, l’inattendu de la houle, les coups de coude de l’éclair, la surdité du sépulcre. Il pèse dix mille, et il ricoche comme une balle d’enfant. Ce sont des tournoiements brusquement coupés d’angles droits. Et que faire? Comment en venir à bout? Une tempête cesse, un cyclône passe, un vent tombe, un mât brisé se remplace, une voie d’eau se bouche, un incendie s’éteint; mais que devenir avec cette énorme brute de bronze? De quelle façon s’y prendre? Vous pouvez raisonner un dogue, étonner un taureau, fasciner un boa, effrayer un tigre, attendrir un lion; aucune ressource avec ce monstre, un canon lâché. Vous ne pouvez pas le tuer, il est mort; et en même temps, il vit. Il vit d’une vie sinistre qui lui vient de l’infini.
(One of the carronades of the battery, a twenty-four-pounder, had got loose.
This is perhaps the most formidable of ocean accidents. Nothing more terrible can happen to a vessel in open sea and under full sail.
A gun that breaks its moorings becomes suddenly some indescribable supernatural beast. It is a machine which transforms itself into a monster. This mass turns upon its wheels, has the rapid movements of a billiard-ball; rolls with the rolling, pitches with the pitching; goes, comes, pauses, seems to meditate; resumes its course, rushes along the ship from end to end like an arrow, circles about, springs aside, evades, rears, breaks, kills, exterminates. It is a battering-ram which assaults a wall at its own caprice. Moreover, the battering-ram is metal, the wall wood. It is the entrance of matter into liberty. One might say that this eternal slave avenges itself. It seems as if the power of evil hidden in what we call inanimate objects finds a vent and bursts suddenly out. It has an air of having lost patience, of seeking some fierce, obscure retribution; nothing more inexorable than this rage of the inanimate. The mad mass has the bounds of a panther, the weight of the elephant, the agility of the mouse, the obstinacy of the axe, the unexpectedness of the surge, the rapidity of lightning, the deafness of the tomb. It weighs ten thousand pounds, and it rebounds like a child's ball. Its flight is a wild whirl abruptly cut at right angles. What is to be done? How to end this? A tempest ceases, a cyclone passes, a wind falls, a broken mast is replaced, a leak is stopped, a fire dies out; but how to control this enormous brute of bronze? In what way can one attack it?
You can make a mastiff hear reason, astound a bull, fascinate a boa, frighten a tiger, soften a lion; but there is no resource with that monster, a cannon let loose. You can not kill it—it is dead; at the same time it lives. It lives with a sinister life bestowed on it by infinity.)
The following year, Henry Kingsley references Hugo’s description in his novel Number Seventeen:
At once, of course, the ship was in the trough of the sea, a more fearfully dangerous engine of destruction than Mr. Victor Hugo’s celebrated loose cannon. Every mast went overboard directly, at her first whip up into the wind.
Of course, these are literal, albeit fictional and literary, descriptions of a dangerous object. But by 1882, Hugo’s story is being metaphorically extended into other realms, in this case criminal justice. But note the phrase loose cannon itself is still not being used metaphorically here, rather Hugo’s the story is being employed as allegory. From the St. Louis Globe-Democrat of 6 April 1882:
Readers of Victor Hugo will readily recall the story of the storm at sea, the negligent gunner and the loose cannon—the most vivid of all word pictures painted by the great Frenchman. During a violent hurricane an immense cannon breaks loose from its moorings because the proper officer has neglected its sufficient fastening: its rolling from side to side for a time threaten to wreck the ship; suddenly the delinquent gunner, by an exertion of great courage and dexterity, and at the immense risk of his own life, checks the mad career of the iron monster and secures the safety of the vessel. When the storm is over, this man is called to the quarter deck; he is first decorated for his gallantry and immediately afterwards shot for his neglect. It seems to us that this would be about the way to deal with the captors of Jesse James. It is not denied that they were his associates and partners in some of the worst of his crimes. They were with him in his worst diabolisms, and fully shared his guilt and his plunder. They have, however, done a good thing in ridding the earth of his presence. Then let them have perfect immunity for the killing of James. But afterwards let them be tried and hung for the deeds done by them before they ever thought of betraying their leader, or earning any reward. It would be the Hugo story with the poetry extracted, but with the justice retained.
Finally, we get the phrase loose cannon used as a metaphor in 1889. The following commentary appears in Texas’s Galveston Daily News of 19 December 1889. While the commentary is racist, there is nothing to suggest that the phrase or metaphor themselves are in any way associated with racist ideology:
He who thinks that in any large community the ignorant vote holds the balance of power, fails to take into account of the intelligent vote and of the fact that the votes of ignorant men are, almost in variably, cast in obedience to the command or advice of an intelligent leader. The negro vote in the south is a unit now mainly because it is opposed by the combined white vote. It would in no event become, as Mr. Grady once said, “a loose cannon in a storm-tossed ship,” for the very reason that it has not intelligence enough to voluntarily stand alone as a class and vote as a political unit.
The Galveston Daily News credits the Denver Republican as originally publishing this commentary (it was very common for nineteenth-century newspapers to reprint items that appeared in other papers), but I have been unable to locate that piece. And the identity of the quoted Mr. Grady is also a mystery.
Another early example can be found in North Carolina’s Ashville Daily Citizen of 15 June 1896. The paper uses loose cannon as a simile in a bit of humorous imagery in an article about a proposed law that would require stagecoaches to install cuspidors for the comfort of the passengers. For those unfamiliar with the word, a cuspidor is a bucket into which people can spit tobacco juice:
Before this part of the ordinance becomes a law it ought to be seriously considered whether it is possible to comply with it. Who wishes to ride over mountain roads chaperoned by a cuspidor? Imagine the thing adjusting itself to some heavy grades with the floor of the carriage sharply inclined. It would be almost as destructive to appreciation of the scenery as a loose cannon is to the bulwarks of a ship.
And in 1899, we get loose cannon used as a simile for a runaway automobile. From Georgia’s Augusta Chronicle of 18 December 1899:
We had read some interesting accounts of automobiles running away from inexpert motorman [sic], but this is the first story we have read of a driverless horseless carriage going on a rampage on its account, and bulging around like a loose cannon on deck [sic] of a ship. The old story of the gun being dangerous without lock, stock or barrel, seems to be eclipsed by the danger of a horseless carriage without a driver.
The final sentence of this passage provides a very mixed nonsensical metaphor, combining loose cannon with lock, stock, and barrel.
With the exception of the Hugo and Kingsley passages, none of these nineteenth-century uses are literal descriptions of a cannon loose on the deck of the ship, and those two are fictional. If loose cannons did in actuality pose a threat onboard ship, sailors did not refer to them as such.
Furthermore, according to the Corpus of Historical American English, the phrase and metaphor remained rare until the 1970s, with only occasional uses here and there. This rise in usage in the 70s follows a well-publicized use of loose cannon by Richard Nixon during the height of the Watergate scandal. On 14 April 1973 Nixon wrote the following in his diary:
I have a note here saying, “the loose cannon has finally gone off,” that's probably what could be said because that’s what Magruder did when he went in and talked to the U.S. Attorney.
Of course, that’s a private note that would not become public until years later. But a few days later, on 19 April 1973, Nixon called White House Counsel John Dean a “loose cannon.” That remark was recorded in the Oval Office tapes and made public on 3 May 1974 when the transcript of that conversation was released. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward reported on it in an article on the paper’s front page:
During a conversation with lawyers for Haldeman and Ehrlichman on April 19, 1973, the President observed that Dean was a “loose cannon” who might be granted immunity from prosecution himself in exchange for testifying against Mr. Nixon’s two principal aides.
That same day, buried inside the A section of the Post, another article appeared, this time with the headline “President’s Remarks: Dean ‘a Loose Cannon’”:
John Dean was a “loose cannon.” Pat Gray just “isn’t very smart.” John Mitchell wasn’t minding the store and Chuck Colson talked too much. The Cuban burglars were a bunch of “jackasses.” Len Garment tended to hit the panic button. Gordon Liddy was “crazy.”
These were some of the judgments, acid and unsparing, delivered by the President as he pondered within the Oval Office how to keep the unraveling Watergate conspiracy and cover-up from enveloping “the presidency.”
(The paragraph in question from Nixon’s 14 April 1973 diary reads as if it is a later editorial comment by Nixon, although the published text presents it as part of the diary entry written on that day. If it is indeed a later insertion, it may be that Nixon was misremembering and that the note Nixon refers to is in reference to Dean, not Magruder. Without the actual diary manuscript, however, it’s impossible to tell.)
The rise in the use of loose cannon follows these uses by Nixon. Of course, Nixon’s use may not have inspired the popularity of the phrase; it could simply be a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc—the phrase had already become more popular orally, and Nixon was picking up on that—but given the widespread coverage of Nixon’s remark, it would seem to be the inspiration for its popularity.
Loose cannon is a good example of why one should not assume the obvious explanation is the correct one. Often, the actual history is stranger and leads one through various passages and into corners that one would never suspect on its face.
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