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See also: carpet bagger

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

From carpetbag +‎ -er, because many carried their belongings in cheap luggage made from carpet fabric.

Pronunciation

Noun

carpetbagger (plural carpetbaggers)

  1. (politics, history, chiefly US, offensive) A migrant from the Northern to the Southern States after the American Civil War of 1861–5, especially one who went South to gain political influence.
    • 1936 June 30, Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, →OCLC; republished New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, 1944, →OCLC, part V, page 981:
      “You are way behind the times,” he said. “There is no Klan in Atlanta now. Probably not in Georgia. You’ve been listening to the Klan outrage stories of your Scallawag and Carpetbagger friends.”
    • 2012, William A. Blair, Journal of the Civil War Era: Winter 2012 Issue, UNC Press Books, →ISBN, page 539:
      The carpetbagger remains one of the most enduring symbols of the Reconstruction era. Technically, a carpetbagger was simply a northerner who went South in the wake of the Civil War and took part in Republican Party politics. For most of its lifespan, however, the term has been an epithet, denoting a lowly, immoral northern opportunist, a demagogue who preyed on the defeated South, perverted sectional peace, and rose to power by deceiving African American voters.
  2. (derogatory, by extension) One who comes to a place or organisation with which they have no previous connection with the sole or primary aim of personal gain, especially political or financial gain.
    • 2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Penguin, published 2010, page 339:
      By the tenth century, out of the diversity of these Christianized Anglo-Saxon kingdoms emerged one of the most coherent political units in Europe, a single monarchy of England, with a precociously centralized government which eventually fell like a ripe plum into the grateful hands of Norman carpetbaggers in 1066.
    • 2012 January 5, Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations, Penguin, →ISBN:
      A large number of estates, and all the most important offices, were taken over by incoming Russian officials, adventurers and carpetbaggers. At the head of them were figures like General Alexander Rimsky Korsakov (1753–1840), 

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