Not Waving but Drowning Not Waving but Drowning "Not Waving but Drowning" is a poem by the British poet Stevie Smith. It was published in 1957 as part of a collection of the same title. The most famous of Smith's poems, it gives an account of a drowned man whose distressed thrashing in the water had been mistaken for waving. The poem was accompanied by one of Smith's drawings, as was common in her work. The poem's personal significance has been the topic of several pieces of literary criticism because Smith was treated for psychological problems. She contemplated suicide at the age of eight
Waving the bloody shirt a shirt stained with the blood of a carpetbagger whipped by the Ku Klux Klan during the Reconstruction Era. While Butler did give a speech condemning the Klan, he never waved anyone's bloody shirt. White Southerners mocked Butler, using the fiction of his having "waved the bloody shirt" to dismiss Klan thuggery and other atrocities committed against freed slaves and Republicans. The Red Shirts white supremacist paramilitary organization took their name from the term. Waving the bloody shirt In the American election campaigns in the 19th century, "waving the bloody shirt" was a phrase used to ridicule opposing politicians who