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American usage

In the United States, the negative 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 being at the expense of white Southerners, many of whom were as former Confederates deprived of political power due to Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Due to resentment toward the carpetbaggers during Reconstruction, white Southerners clung to the sentiment "The South will rise again!", which is actually still common among some whites in the South.

Carpetbaggers are not to be confused with scalawags, who were Republican sympathizers in the South during Reconstruction.

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.

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