If you follow politics, sports, Hollywood or the arts, you’ve no doubt heard the insult “sellout” thrown around to describe someone perceived to have betrayed a core principle or shared value in their pursuit of personal gain.
The term has recently been hurled at a range of well-known targets: Donald Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows for cooperating with a special counsel investigating election fraud in 2020; Kim Kardashian for advertising her personal brands as a form of women’s empowerment; even former NFL great Deion Sanders, for leaving Jackson State, a historically Black university, to coach at the University of Colorado.
Most people, I find, are familiar with this accusation. But few people really know the full story of “selling out” – when and where the term originated, how it spread across so many different sectors of American culture, and just why this insult hurts so much. These are the questions I set out to answer in the book I’m currently writing, tentatively titled “Sellouts! The Story of an American Insult.”
Through my research, I found that the idea of selling out originates with American politics — and more precisely, with the scandals of the Gilded Age.
Gilded Age origins
This era, which gets its name from Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s 1873 satirical novel “The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day,” spans roughly from the 1870s to the 1900s. These decades saw the rise of industrial capitalism in the United States: people moving to cities, technologies transforming industries like the railroads, growing unrest and activism by workers, and crises erupting from an economy built around banks, stocks and corporations.
Until this time, the phrase “selling out” had largely been used to describe the sale of one’s stock or holdings – cattle, steel, grain, real estate. But by the 1870s, the term had quickly gained a new meaning as an insult for public figures — especially politicians — who had compromised their morals, and the needs of the community, in pursuit of illicit personal gain.
If you follow politics, sports, Hollywood or the arts, you’ve no doubt heard the insult “sellout” thrown around to describe someone perceived to have betrayed a core principle or shared value in their pursuit of personal gain.
The term has recently been hurled at a range of well-known targets: Donald Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows for cooperating with a special counsel investigating election fraud in 2020; Kim Kardashian for advertising her personal brands as a form of women’s empowerment; even former NFL great Deion Sanders, for leaving Jackson State, a historically Black university, to coach at the University of Colorado.
Most people, I find, are familiar with this accusation. But few people really know the full story of “selling out” – when and where the term originated, how it spread across so many different sectors of American culture, and just why this insult hurts so much. These are the questions I set out to answer in the book I’m currently writing, tentatively titled “Sellouts! The Story of an American Insult.”
Through my research, I found that the idea of selling out originates with American politics — and more precisely, with the scandals of the Gilded Age.