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American usage

In the United States, the perjorative term carpetbagger was used to refer to a Northerner (Yankees) who traveled to the South after the American Civil War, through the late 1860s and the 1870s, during Reconstruction. They went south to exploit the power vacuum created by the end of the American Civil War when the Confederate States (see: Confederate States of America, U.S. Southern states) were placed under martial law. Since many Southern business and political leaders had been ousted from their positions as a result of the war, there was much personal gain to be found by travelling South, and many of these carpetbaggers became mayors, governors, and business leaders. Carpetbaggers were so named after the habit of carrying belongings in a carpet bag. The carpet-bagging was commonly perceived by white Southerners as a threat to the status quo, and it was. The Southerners feared that along with the carpetbaggers will come racial equality and black rule.

Yet most Carpetbaggers were in the Union army and had stayed in the South after the Civil War ended. They invested heavily into education and some worked for the Freedmen's Bureau. Carpetbaggers were highly educated and brought vital capital to the South, attempting to revive its economy. Carpetbaggers have historical had a negative reputation that tends to overshadow their positive contributions to the South.

Carpetbaggers are not to be confused with scalawags, who were Republican sympathizers in the South during Reconstruction. However, both groups of people shared a vision for a new South, one that would overthrow the crippled plantation regime and replace it with a healthy industry. Other goals were to improve education, infrastructure, and roads, thus "reconstructing" the South.

Today, the word is still used to describe "an outsider who moves someplace to exploit the natives and enrich himself at their expense," or "a politician who moves to another state for political reasons, such as ease of election."

American Republican Alan Keyes accused Democrat Hillary Clinton of being a carpetbagger when she moved to New York to run for the United States Senate in 2000. The accusation ended up coming back to bite Keyes when he ran for a Senate seat from Illinois, having previously lived in Maryland. He lost the election to Barack Obama.

See also: parachute candidate

UK usage

Carpetbagging was also used in the United Kingdom in the 1990s during the wave of flotations of building societies (mutuals), the term indicating the advocates of these conversions. Investors in these mutuals would receive shares in the new public companies, usually distributed at a flat rate, thus equally benefiting small and large investors, and providing a broad incentive for members to vote for conversion-advocating (carpetbagging) leadership candidates. The word was first used in this context by the chief executive of one of the building societies under threat, who introduced rules removing new savers' entitlement to potential windfalls and stated in a press release, "I have no qualms about disenfranchising carpetbaggers."

Major building societies which converted included Northern Rock, Halifax, Bradford and Bingley and Woolwich.

In the 2005 general election, Respect MP George Galloway was accused of being a carpet-bagger by Labour's Constitutional Affairs Minister David Lammy during an interview with Jeremy Paxman. Galloway, who hails from Scotland, ran for office in London's Bethnal Green and Bow consitutency on an anti-war platform. It was suggested that he targeted this riding because of its largely Muslim population, pushing the issue of war in Iraq for his own gain while ignoring the basic concerns facing this area, one of the UK's poorest constituencies. His response was that his old constituency had been disoved and that it is perfectly reasonable for a new party to stand it's best known candidate in the area it has the strongest support.

For the Harold Robbins novel, see The Carpetbaggers. Here, the word has the generic meaning of a presumptuous newcomer who enters a new territory seeking success. In this case, the territory is the movie industry, and the newcomer is a wealthy heir to an industrial fortune who, like Howard Hughes, simultaneously pursued aviation and moviemaking avocations.

• Reconstruction
• Pejorative political terms