carpetbagger = αλεξιπτωτιστής (μτφ.)

[nickel]

Αλεξιπτωτιστής με τη μεταφορική σημασία:

(μτφ.) ειρωνικά και μειωτικά, για άτομο που, χωρίς να έχει τα απαιτούμενα προσόντα ή την πείρα, εμφανίζεται ξαφνικά σαν ουρανοκατέβατος και παίρνει κάποια θέση, παραγκωνίζοντας άλλους καταλληλότερους: Έπεσε σαν αλεξιπτωτιστής κι έγινε διευθυντής. Διάφοροι αλεξιπτωτιστές που παριστάνουν τους δημοσιογράφους.

Για να αποδώσει την πιο συνηθισμένη σημασία της αγγλικής λέξης:
someone who gets involved in politics in a place away from where they live, because they think they will be more successful there.

Όπως, ας πούμε, η Χίλαρι Κλίντον όταν κατέβηκε στη Νέα Υόρκη για έδρα στη Γερουσία (ως γερουσιαστής; ως γερουσιάστρια; ως γερουσιαστίνα;). Ή η Ντόρα Μπακογιάννη στην Ευρυτανία.

Τη λέξη τη θυμάμαι από την ταινία με τον Τζορτζ Πέπαρντ, The Carpetbaggers (1964), που νομίζω ότι εδώ είχε τον τίτλο Οι τυχοδιώκτες. Λέει στην imdb:
George Peppard plays a hard-driven industrialist more than a little reminiscent of Howard Hughes. While he builds airplanes, directs movies and breaks hearts, his friends and lovers try to reach his human side, and find that it's an uphill battle. The film's title is a metaphor for self-promoting tycoons who perform quick financial takeovers, impose dictatorial controls for short-term profits, then move on to greener pastures.

 

[Earion]

Carpetbagger, a Northerner who moved to the Southern states after the Civil War and went into politics. A term of contempt, the word was current during the Reconstruction era to denote Northern-born politicians who played prominent roles in the Republican Reconstruction governments of the ex-Confederate states between 1867 and 1876.

It was charged by both white Southerners and Northerners that these men were so poor that when they went South they carried all their be¬longings in satchels made of cheap carpeting. The carpetbaggers went into the South for a variety of reasons, although a majority of them seem to have been motivated by a desire to improve themselves economically.

When the great majority of Southern whites boycotted elections to the constitutional conventions held in their states in 1867 because they preferred military rule to Negro suffrage, leadership in these conventions fell into the hands of the Republican carpetbaggers and a small group of native white Southerners called “scalawags.” So long as the Republican party controlled the Southern states, political leadership remained in the hands of carpetbaggers and scalawags. Gen¬erally speaking, the role of the carpetbagger was more significant in the states of the Deep South, which had Negro voting majorities, while the role of the native scalawag tended to be predominant in the states of the Upper South where white voters outnumbered the Negroes.

Instrumental in shaping the new constitutions of the ex-Confederate states, the carpetbaggers wrote into them certain progressive provisions of their own Northern states. Thus, Robert K. Scott, the dominant figure in the South Carolina convention, modeled the South Carolina constitution of 1868 on the constitution of Ohio, where he formerly lived. In the same state, carpetbag¬ger Gov. Daniel H. Chamberlain conducted his office with integrity and efficiency.

Unfortunately, the careers of such carpetbag¬gers as Gov. Henry C. Warmoth in Louisiana, Gov. Adelbert Ames in Mississippi, and Milton S. Littlefield in North Carolina and Florida support Horace Greeley’s description of the carpetbagger as a person “bent on stealing and plundering many of them with both arms around Negroes and their hands in their pockets, seeing if they cannot pick a paltry dollar out of them.”

Whatever their merits, the carpetbaggers aroused the bitter hostility of native whites in the South, and they were almost all forced out when conservative Democrats recaptured control of the various ex-Confederate states during the decade of the 1870’s.

JAMES A. BEATSON, University of Arizonas

Encyclopedia Americana, International edition, 2002. v. 5

A CARPETBAGGER, supported by bayonets, bends the back of the South in this Reconstruction Era cartoon