One witness's odd word gave New Deal critics a name for waste
On April 3, 1935, a New York relief-hearing witness's answer launched "boondoggle" into national politics, and both Roosevelt's critics and Roosevelt himself were soon fighting over what it should mean.
A wasteful project or activity, often paid for with public money, that produces little or nothing worth its cost.1
A witness answers for a word the aldermen didn't know
On April 3, 1935, a New York City Aldermanic committee investigating relief spending heard a witness named Robert Marshall use a word none of the aldermen recognized: boondoggling.2 Asked to explain it, Marshall offered only that it was "a term applied back in pioneer days to…things men and boys do that are useful in their everyday operations or recreations or about their home." The committee chairman pressed further: was it named for Daniel Boone? "No," Marshall said. "It is boon doggles. It is spelled differently."2 No stenographer's transcript survives, and a rival account has Marshall giving a shorter, plainer answer: boondoggling was "simply a term applied back in the pioneer days to what we call gadgets today."3
The next morning, the New York Times put a number on the room's laughter: "$3,187,000 Relief is Spent to Teach Jobless to Play … Boon Doggles Made."3 What the money actually bought, relief officials told the committee, was training jobless men to make "useful articles made out of wood or leather, such as ax handles, belts, holsters, knife sheaths, rope products and whips."4
Robert Link's story runs into an older newspaper clipping
The story usually told starts a decade earlier, in Boy Scout troops. Robert H. Link, a 1920s scoutmaster, is credited with coining the word for the braided leather cords scouts made and wore as neckerchief slides, gaining fame when Rochester scouts presented one to the Prince of Wales at the 1929 World Jamboree.1 Link never told that story publicly until April 1935, the same week as the relief hearing, and he told it two different ways within days. A syndicated column on April 6 had him coin the word "out of the blue sky," with "absolutely no significance" beyond decorating a uniform.3 Two days later, the Buffalo Evening News and the New York Herald Tribune both had him say the word came to him at his son's birth in 1926, when he looked at "the faintly squirming, wrinkly infant" and it "popped into his head."42
Neither telling survives contact with the print record. A Rochester, New York newspaper used the word in July 1927, two years before the Jamboree and a year before Link's son was born. The earliest print use has nothing to do with a leather cord: two scout leaders forced to dismantle an oversized tent were described as tricked, "Boondoggle. This was terrible."4 By December of that year, a Rochester scout troop had already named its own newsletter Boondoggle.4 Robert Link's coinage claim, in etymologist David Wilton's judgment, "lacks supporting evidence" but is "plausible": the word was already circulating among Rochester scouts before Link says he invented it.4
More than ninety years later, a rail line earns the same word
The word left that April hearing already contested. Within the year, a Republican National Committee pamphlet was calling boondoggling "'Frankly Destructive' Roosevelt's pet way of wasting money," using it as a name for the whole New Deal.2 Roosevelt tried to take the word back for himself. Speaking in Newark in January 1936, he told the crowd, "If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for many years to come."2
It wasn't. More than ninety years later, boondoggle still names spending that produces nothing worth its cost. On August 12, 2026, the Daily Signal ran the headline "After Billions Spent and Zero Trains, California's Rail Boondoggle Nears a Reckoning," opening: "California's high-speed rail boondoggle may finally be running out of money."5 The relief hearing's ax handles and belts, and the unfinished rail line, are the same complaint at different scales: money visibly spent and nothing delivered worth the cost.
Sources
- Merriam-Webster · Boondoggle
- Vocabulary.com · Ben Zimmer, "The Story of Boondoggle: A Useful Word for Useless Work"
- World Wide Words · Michael Quinion, "Boondoggle"
- Wordorigins.org · David Wilton, "Boondoggle / Woggle"
- The Daily Signal · Jarrett Stepman, "After Billions Spent and Zero Trains, California's Rail Boondoggle Nears a Reckoning"