Swamp Yankee

"Swamp Yankee" is a colloquial pejorative for rural Yankees (northeasterners with English colonial ancestry). The term "Yankee" connotes urbane industriousness, whereas the term "Swamp Yankee" signifies a more countrified, stubborn, independent, and less refined subtype. It is an old fashioned term from the 1930s through the early 1960s, and often has little meaning today.

Ruth Schell's 1963 article "Swamp Yankee" in American Speech explains in detail the characteristics and usage associated with the term. She claims that it is used predominantly in Rhode Island by the incoming minority groups (Italian, Irish) to describe "a rural dweller—one of stubborn, old-fashioned, frugal, English-speaking Yankee stock, of good standing in the rural community, but usually possessing minimal formal education and little desire to augment it. Swamp Yankees themselves react to the term with slight disapproval or indifference.... The term is unfavorably received when used by a city dweller with the intention of ridiculing a country resident; however, when one country resident refers to another as a swamp Yankee, no offense is taken, and it is treated as good-natured jest."

Schell continues, "the term is most frequently applied to older people and is often preceded by old. Sometimes it is shortened to swampy.... [Swamp Yankees] were not among the religious and ambitious Pilgrims who had sailed to America on the Mayflower; but rather they were more often among the undesirables who had left England as the result of some form of misconduct and who retreated to the swamps when they arrived here." The typical swamp Yankee can be found in an old, rural general store in the evening where four or five of the immediate countryside's swamp Yankees gather and tell stories for several hours. Such a gathering has been jocularly described as a "lying contest". "The term swamp Yankee is becoming less known and may be unknown in a few generations.... Probably the best reason for its disappearance is the vanishing of the swamp Yankee himself as society moves toward urban and suburban life."

At one time, "Swamp Yankees" even had their own variety of isolated country music, according to an article written by Harvard professor Paul Di Maggio and Vanderbilt University professor Richard Peterson.

In 1993, playwright Arthur Miller used the term in his play The Last Yankee to refer to a New England carpenter who was a descendant of one of the Founding Fathers. Rhode Island cartoonist Don Bousquet often parodies the "Swamp Yankee" in his cartoons. Kerry W. Buckley describes President Calvin Coolidge as a "swamp Yankee" in a 2003 article in New England Quarterly, defining it as "scion of an old family that was no longer elite or monied."

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