----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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 ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]