"on the wrong side of history"

[Jonathan Lighter]

I hear this phrase a lot on TV news these days.  It's the side of history
you don't want to end up on: not quite the dust bin, but not the high-rent
district either. Standing in the way of sociopolitical progress.

The earliest ex. I can (almost) verify is the following, from a GB snippet.
(The date is correct.):

1951 Robert B. Textor _Failure in Japan_ (N.Y.: John Day) 22: Our task,
then, is not blindly to back a political group that is on the wrong side of
history. Rather, we must develop an advance guard of forces that will favor
nonviolent change....

GB has some earlier cites (and some bogus, I think) from as far back as
1908, but the meaning is different.

JL

--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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