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The first use of "grandfather" as a verb in this sense did not arise in economic thought.
To my knowledge it first appeared in common public usage some time after Oklahoma voters
in 1910 amended the state constitution (of 1907), which had provided nearly general
manhood suffrage, to limit the right to vote to men who could pass a literacy test, except
[always the key word, indicating the more or last vast range of exemptions from the law]
for those men who had the right to vote before January 1, 1866, or who were then
foreigners but had since immigrated to the United States--and in either case their
(legitimate) sons and grandsons. This was in effect to leave the right to vote in Oklahoma
to practically all white men, but exclude as many as possible "black" men (including men
whose ancestors were Indian as well as black). In short, if somehow your grandfather had
the right to vote, you presumptively had the
right to vote. (How many black men had the right to vote anywhere in the US before January
1, 1866?) If not, you had to pass an unpassable "literacy test," or you could not vote.
 
Election officers in Oklahoma enforced the legislation. The USG indicted and convicted
some of them for doing so, for violation of the Fifteenth Amendment of the US
Constitution, and they appealed the judgment. In 1913 the NAACP filed a brief in the case,
for the USG. The US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit sent its questions to the US
Supreme Court, in the case of Frank Guinn and J.J. Beal vs. the US, and in June 1915 the
Supreme Court ruled against the "Grandfather Clause," judging it as before to be a
violation of the Fifteenth Amendment. I believe this is the first description of the legal
trope for exceptions and exemptions and privileges and exclusions as a "grandfather
clause." (If not, I ask for correction and enlightenment.) If so, then originally "to
grandfather" meant to legalize a class of the exempt and the privileged, to establish an
inequality, a kind of apartheid. I recommend W.E.B. Dubois and John Hope Franklin on the
question.
 
Afterward, lawyers referred to "grandfathering" often, and from them economists, few
having any idea of its origin or original sense, adopted it in their "thought."
 
John Womack  
 
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