"on the wrong side of history"

[Dan Goncharoff]

I would have associated the phrase with Steve Spender, and note that,
although GB has his memoir World Within World dated as 1953, Worldcat
has it as 1951, which is the usual date for the book.

DanG



On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 6:41 PM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      "on the wrong side of history"
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>
> 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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