What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Vote with their feet’?
The concept of a vote with the feet originated in ancient Rome. The first example that I can find of it in English is in the American academic Robert Fowler Leighton’s A History of Rome, which was published in 1878:
The senators who had not held a curule office were styled senatores pedarii because they assented to the opinions of the consulares, praetorii, etc., and when the division was taken voted with their feet (pedibus in sententiam ire).
Leighton was describing a real Roman practice. The Senate voted by division: when the presiding magistrate put the question, senators walked across the chamber to stand beside the speaker whose proposal they supported. Latin had a set phrase for it, pedibus ire in sententiam, which Lewis and Short’s A Latin Dictionary, 1879, glosses as ‘to adopt one’s opinion, take sides with one’, citing Livy’s account of the Senate in Book 9 of his history.
The 2nd-century Roman writer Aulus Gellius devoted a chapter of his Attic Nights to the junior senators called pedarii, and recorded the popular belief that they got their name from this very habit. In John C. Rolfe’s translation, 1927:
“There are many who think that those senators were called pedarii who did not express their opinion in words, but agreed with the opinion of others by stepping to their side of the House.”
Gellius wasn’t persuaded, pointing out that every senator voted that way when a division was called, and he preferred the explanation that the pedarii walked to the Senate house while their seniors rode there in chariots. Either way, the Roman vote with the feet was a literal one, cast inside the chamber by walking towards the man you agreed with.
The phrase as we now use it means almost the opposite: walking away. The Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries entry for ‘foot’ defines ‘vote with your feet’ as ‘to show what you think about something by going or not going somewhere’. That sense belongs to the 20th century, and every early example of it that I can find is attributed to Lenin.
The earliest is in an English translation of a reminiscence by Karl Radek, a Bolshevik colleague of Lenin’s, printed in The Communist Review, the journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain, in May 1923. Radek recalled arguing with Lenin against signing the Brest-Litovsk peace with Germany in 1918, and being met with the plainest of answers:
“But don’t you see that the Mujik voted against the war?” Lenin asked me. “Excuse me, when and how did he vote against it?” “He voted with his feet, he is running away from the front.”
Radek was reporting a conversation from memory, and in translation, so the exact words are his rather than Lenin’s. He was there, though, and his is the earliest account we have. The remark travelled as a story about the collapse of the Russian army in 1917, and Lenin’s name travelled with it. Eugene Lyons repeated it in Stalin, Czar of All the Russias, 1940:
“From the fronts, soldiers streamed into the capital. They were ‘voting with their feet,’ as Lenin put it, by abandoning the war.”
By 1944 it had reached the House of Commons, still with its Russian attribution attached. Kenneth Pickthorn, arguing about school fees on 28th March 1944, told the House:
“The hon. Gentleman will remember the occasion when someone asked Lenin whether the Russian Army had voted for something or other - peace, I think - he said that they had voted with their feet.”
In November of the same year George Muff used it in a debate on demobilisation without any mention of Lenin at all: “the men voted with their feet, and marched home”, he said of the soldiers of the First World War. When a phrase no longer needs its source explaining, it has arrived. Lenin was still being credited in the Commons as late as May 1961, when Emrys Hughes reminded members that “they have voted with their feet” was his verdict on the Russian army of 1917, but by then the expression had long since stopped being about soldiers, or about Russia, and had settled into the everyday sense of people showing what they think of a place by turning up to it, or staying away.