{"id":559,"date":"2018-04-09T14:24:32","date_gmt":"2018-04-09T14:24:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=559"},"modified":"2018-04-09T15:20:16","modified_gmt":"2018-04-09T15:20:16","slug":"history-of-draining-the-swamps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/history-of-draining-the-swamps\/","title":{"rendered":"The history of “drain(ing) the swamp(s)”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In US political discourse, the phrase\u00a0drain the swamp(s)<\/em>\u00a0usually refers to fighting corruption and undue influence<\/a>. But the origins of the expression are quite far from this sense.\u00a0The swamps in question are the Pontine Marshes<\/a> (Pomptinae Paludes<\/em>) to the south of Rome. Efforts to drain them have been made, on and off, for three millennia, and even predate Roman settlement in the region. The\u00a0Appian Way<\/a> (Via<\/i>\u00a0Appia<\/em>, completed\u00a0in 312 BCE), a famous ancient road, traversed the swamps, and major efforts (by the senators and consuls, by the emperors, and by the medieval popes) were required to keep the roadbed above water level. And of course the swamps’ waters are infested with malarial mosquitoes. Thus it is no surprise that many a historical Roman leader used “drain the swamps!” as a political slogan.<\/p>\n

The most famous swamp drainer of all is Benito Mussolini<\/a>, who tackled the marshes (now known as\u00a0Agro Pontino<\/em>) as part of a flashy, highly publicized infrastructure campaign.\u00a0Once completed\u2014with untold workers succumbing to malaria in the process\u20142,000 pro-fascist families from North Italy were granted farmsteads in former swampland. But after the Allied invasion of Sicily, the Armstice of\u00a0Cassibile,\u00a0and the Nazi reinforcement of Italy, the Nazis stopped the pumps and opened the dikes, flooding the marshes with brackish water. While it’s not at all clear this tactic was effective at slowing down Allied advances, it certainly did help to spread malaria (at a time when quinine was in short supply) and it utterly\u00a0devastated the region’s civilian population. It was an act of biological warfare against a now-hostile civilian population no longer aligned with the Nazi cause.<\/p>\n

Propaganda poster for the “Agro Pontino” campaign.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Nowadays the swamp waters are relatively well-controlled, and liberal application of the pesticide DDT in the middle 20th century helped to rein in the mosquito population, and the region has largely been repopulated.<\/p>\n

Postscript:<\/strong> I want to be clear that I’m not saying that “drain the swamp” is always intended to index Mussolini (or whatever), just that many well-read Westerners will likely see use of this expression as “normalizing fascism”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In US political discourse, the phrase\u00a0drain the swamp(s)\u00a0usually refers to fighting corruption and undue influence. But the origins of the expression are quite far from this sense.\u00a0The swamps in question are the Pontine Marshes (Pomptinae Paludes) to the south of Rome. Efforts to drain them have been made, on and off, for three millennia, and … Continue reading “The history of “drain(ing) the swamp(s)””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":568,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions\/573"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}