At a campaign stop in Hampton Beach,
New Hampshire on February 9, 2020, Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden
responded to a 21-year old voter who had the temerity to say she had once been
to a caucus by calling her an “a lying, dog-faced pony-soldier.”
It’s a curious and novel expression. But all of the separate elements of the
expression have their own, unique history.
“Pony Soldier” and “Dog-face” are
both United States military slang for members of the cavalry and infantry,
respectively, which means that stringing them together an oxymoron. Although neither one of those terms necessarily
relates to lying, an occasional variant of “bald-faced liar” may explain how “lying”
and “dog-faced” were put together. “Dog-faced
liar” appears in print very infrequently, but regularly over a period spanning
three centuries, suggesting that it is more common than its frequency in print
might indicate.
Joe Biden claims that he took the
expression from a John Wayne movie. He
may be mistaken, or he may have conflated different lines from different
films. And examining the rich history of each separate element of the
expression may shed more light on the various
influences on Joe Biden’s choice of words.
Joe’s Story
New Hampshire 2020 was not was not
the first former-Vice President Biden called someone a “lying, dog-faced pony
soldier.” In 2018, at a rally in support
of Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, he called her Republican
challenger a liar, using the more colorful expression he claimed to have
borrowed from his brother, who in turn borrowed it from a John Wayne movie.
As my brother who loves to use lines from movies, a John Wayne
movie, here’s what – a line from a movie, a John Wayne movie, where the Indian
Chief turns to John Wayne and says, ‘This is a lying, dog-faced pony-soldier. [i]
The John Wayne explanation may be
close to the mark, even if mistaken or incomplete. As
reported by Matthew Dessem at Slate.com,[ii] he may have conflated lines from two different
Westerns, Tyrone Powers’ 1952 film, Pony
Soldier, and John Wayne’s 1949 film, She
Wore a Yellow Ribbon.
In Pony Soldier, an Indian chief says of a Royal Canadian Mounted
Policeman, “The pony soldier speaks with a tongue of the snake that rattles.” The line appears to be a close match to the
meaning of Biden’s “lying . . . pony
soldier” insult, and may have been a source of confusion in his formulating the
expression.
In She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, the narrator says, “Here they are: the
dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the 50-cents-a-day professionals.” This line might explain how the word “dog-faced”
got into the expression, but it does not explain how “lying” relates to either “dog-faced”
or “pony soldier.”
Dog-Faced Liar
Apparently variants of the more familiar, “bald-faced liar” and “bald-faced lie,” the expressions “dog-faced liar” and
“dog-faced lie” have appeared in print occasionally since the 1890s.
An early example in a political context sounds like something Joe Biden might say today.
If any man, woman or child ever heard me “whooping it up for republicans” either before or since the last campaign or ever heard it intimated that I gave aid, encouragement or comfort to republicans or exhibited the slightest republican tendencies in any manner, shape or form, for heaven’s sake let them come immediately to the rescue of this dog faced liar.
The Alva Pioneer (Alva, Oklahoma), February 4, 1898, page 4.
Another example highlighted an unforeseen danger of a new technology – the telephone.
A certain Marshfield man has been nursing a lame hand for
several days the result of a bad temper.
It happened while he was talking across a telephone. It was a heated conversation he and another
man were having, in the course of which the fellow at the other end called him a dog-faced liar. Without thinking he hauled off and struck at
him. The distance between them was
three-quarters of a mile and instead of landing on the fellow’s nose as he
intended he hit an oak panel.
The Marshfield News (Marshfield, Wisconsin), February 1, 1906, page 1.
As late as 2005, a newspaper vocabulary
quiz (Greg Wilkinson’s “VocabPower”) used “dog-faced liar” as an example of a
dog idiom.[iii]
It is possible that Joe Biden
transposed the expression “dog-faced liar” when formulating “lying dog-faced
pony soldier.” It wouldn’t be the first
time a Democratic legislator and one-time candidate for the Presidential
nomination used a variant of “dog-faced liar.”
James Traficant represented the 17th District of Ohio in the
United States House of Representatives for seventeen years, all while Joe Biden
was serving in the Senate. They both had
Presidential aspirations in 1988; Traficant entered the race a month or so
after Joe Biden dropped out in the wake of multiple accusations of plagiarism.
In 1982, before serving in Congress, a
defiant Traficant (then an Ohio Sherriff) called statements by FBI agents
investigating whether he had ignored illegal activities in his jurisdiction as,
“a damn, low-down, dog-faced lie.” Traficant weathered the storm, and three
years later was elected to the House of Representatives as a Democrat
representing Ohio’s 17th District.
It’s not clear whether Traficant’s characterization of the accusations
against him in 1982 were accurate or not, but accusations against him decades
later were proven true. Traficant left
office only after Congress expelled him in the wake of convictions on ten
counts of bribery, racketeering and tax evasion.
Pony Soldiers
The name “Pony Soldier,” as applied
to cavalry soldiers, is generally credited to Native Americans.
As reported nearly a decade later, the
name is said to have been used at least as early as 1868. In 1877, General Lew Wallace proposed that in
order to “conquer the Indians,” they should “simply Indianize a corps of white
men, who will subsist as the red men do, move as they do, and fight as they
do.” The plan was said to be feasible,
in part because of a similar plan followed by the 19th Kansas
Cavalry in the fall of 1868. The cavalry
gave up their horses and pursued hostile Cheyenne and Arapahoe on foot,
sometimes marching thirty miles in a day.
When the Indians were finally literally walked down, they
were astonished at the mode of locomotion used by their pursuers, and
designated them as “Walk-a-heap-pony-soldiers.”
Manhattan Enterprise (Manhattan, Kansas), September 12, 1877, page 1.
The expression,
“walk-a-heap-pony-soldiers,” like “dog-faced pony soldier” more than a century
later, would generally have been considered an oxymoron. “Walk-a-heap” was a name generally used by
Native Americans to refer to infantry, as opposed to the “pony soldiers” in the
cavalry. But in this case, since the
soldiers were members of the cavalry who abandoned their horses, the expression
was appropriate.
The name “walk-a-heap,” as applied to
the infantry, first came to widespread attention 1867 when General Sherman (out
West fighting Indians after the Civil War) was famously called “walk-a-heap,”
among other things, by his Native American critics.
A Correspondent writes us that the Indians say that Sherman
is a “heap big tall, but no good fight.”
They say the soldiers “walk a heap, but no good fight, squaw chase them
with a stick.” The Indians are not far
from right.
Leavenworth Daily Commercial (Leavenworth, Kansas), August 17, 1867, page 4.
“Walk-a-heap” and “Pony Soldier”
appeared together a few years later in an account of a council of Native
Americans.
The white brother is strong, his number exceeds that of the
buffalo . . . he has pony soldiers without number, and walk-a-heaps (infantry)
till no Indian can count them!
Harper’s Weekly, Volume 17, May 10, 1873, page 394.
Interestingly, although the
construction “walk a heap” and “heap big tall” might presumably originate in a
form of pidgin English spoken by non-native speakers of English, the
construction appears to have been borrowed, in a more distant past, from
English-speaking people in the southern United States, as illustrated in a
letter written by a Northerner making a tour of the South and published in
Pennsylvania in 1817.
In Georgia, any thing a little uncommon is said to be “too
digging.” Here they “walk a heap,” and
“work a heap,” and “talk a heap.” The
people of the south always express themselves in the superlative degree.
Lancaster Journal (Lancaster, Pennsylvania), August
26, 1817, page 2.
In time, “Pony Soldier” would become
a beloved nickname regularly used by American cavalry.
As late as 1933, cavalry soldiers in
New Mexico were referred to as “pony soldiers.”
The Deming Headlight (Deming, New Mexico), March 17, 1933, page 1.
As late as the 1980s, an historical
reenactment unit of the United States Army at Fort Hood referred to themselves
as “Pony Soldiers of the 1st Cavalry Division’s Cavalry Horse
Platoon.”[iv]
“Walk-a-heap” did not catch on in the
same way. Decades later, however, a less
literal and facially more negative nickname took on a positive connotation as a
self-applied nickname for United States Army soldiers, generally infantry,
although Navy sailors may have coined the name.
Dog-Face
Soldiers in the United States Army
were frequently called “Dog-faces” as early as the mid-1930s. In some cases, the name was said to refer to
regular army as opposed to draftees, or infantry as opposed to those with
technical training, like radio operators.
A few early explanations of the term suggested that Navy sailors coined
the term, because the army wears dog tags, lives in pup-tents and are always
growling about something.
In 1944, a widely reported incident
in which a military chaplain played the song, “The Dog-Faced Soldier,” to calm
the nerves of soldiers preparing for an amphibious assault in Italy brought the
name to widespread attention.
Soldiers in Italy were still singing
the song in July.
Two of the verses are as follows:
“I wouldn’t give a bean to be a fancy pants Marine;
“I’d rather be a dogface soldier like I am.
“I wouldn’t trade my old O. D.’s for all the navy’s
dungarees.
“For I’m the walking pride of Uncle Sam.
“I’m just a dogface soldier with a rifle on my shoulder,
“And I eat a kraut for breakfast every day.
“So feed me ammunition; keep me in the Third Division,
“Your dogface soldier boy’s O. K.”
Atlanta Constitution, July 18, 1944, page 15.
In 1945, the Third Infantry Division
insulted Adolf Hitler by singing the song on his birthday in a place named for him.
[The Third infantry division] raised the American flag in the
Smashed Adolf Hitler platz in the geographical center of Nuernberg, and the
division’s band played “The Star Spangled Banner” and “The Dog Faced Soldier”
in these precincts where “Deutschland Uber Alles” . . . and the Nazi “Horst
Wessel Lied” have resounded in the past.
Daily Oklahoman
(Ardmore, Oklahoma), April 21, 1945, page 2.
The nickname was still in use after
the war. The closest near-match to Joe
Biden’s “lying dog-faced pony soldier” I could find appeared in an article
about U. S. troops training to oppose Communist aggression in Europe during the
early-Cold War. In this instance,
however, the expression was not an oxymoron.
They are not pretty, but they make the man who lives and
overcomes nature at its worst seem a magnificent creature, rather than a sweat-stained, unwashed, “dog-faced” ground soldier.
The Baltimore Sun, September 9, 1951, Features, Section A, page 1.
The infantry nickname received attention
again in 1953 when Major General William F. Dean, who had led a “valiant,
last-ditch defense of Taejon – in which he battled personally with a bazooka,” returned
home after three years of captivity during the Korean War. His words upon his return were widely
reported.
I want you to get it out of your heads that I’m a hero – I’m
not. I’m just a dog-faced soldier.
Public Opinion
(Chambersburg, Pennsylvania), September 23, 1953.
It was this well-known usage of “dog-face”
that likely influenced the narration used in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, although in the context of a film which
took place in 1876, it was an anachronism.
Other Senses of Dog-Faced
Long before the United States Army
adopted “Dog-Face” as a self-deprecating nickname, it had a long history as an
insult to one’s looks. It was also used descriptively
with a number of unrelated things and people.
Dog-Faced Baboon
George Shaw, Naturalists’s
Miscellany, Volume 6, 1813.
Jo Jo the Dog-Faced Boy
Perhaps the most famous “dog-faced”
person was Jo Jo the Dog-faced boy, a Russian who had toured Europe with his
father and came to the United States under the auspices of P. T. Barnum
following his father’s death.
Years later, a family from Manadalay had a similar skin condition.
 |
Photograph of a Hairy Family of Mandalay. It is Possible That the “Dog-Faced” Men of the Chinese Wilderness Are the Ancestors of These People.
San Francisco Examiner, June 17, 1923, American Weekly Section, page 9.
This dog-faced potato weighing two pounds, two ounces was
brought to the Daily Star offices from the farm of Frank Carlson near Atlas,
Wis. Carlson is a pioneer settler in his
district and raises spuds and peas principally but this is the first dog-faced
spud he has ever unearthed.
The Minneapolis Star, October 15, 1927, page 12.
[i]
Joe Biden speaking at a rally in support of Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) in
Fargo, North Dakota, posted November 1, 2018.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQFtkEN6Sds
[ii]
“Joe Biden Just Called a Woman at One of His Events a ‘Lying, Dog-Faced Pony
Soldier.’ What?,” Matthew Dessem, Slate.com, February 9, 2020. https://slate.com/culture/2020/02/joe-biden-dog-faced-pony-soldier-john-wayne-tyrone-power.html
[iii] The Spokesman-Review (Spokane,
Washington), July 10, 2005, page 36.
[iv] The Paris News (Paris, Texas), May 31,
1986, page 1.
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