Still clear as mud is the origin of that seemingly ageless pejorative "Your name will be Mudd."
Even with the death this week of Dr. Richard D. Mudd, who spent something like 80 years trying to clear the name of his grandfather, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, convicted for conspiracy in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, we are no closer to the definitive source of this lame little slice of language.
I first heard it from the grade school nuns:
"Eugene, you are going to put away those baseball cards or [all together now], your name will be Mudd."
Hey sister, my name's already Eugene; how much worse could it be?
Of course, I had no idea that Mudd was anybody's actual name. I thought she meant, you know, the combination of dirt and water. That mud. I supposed it would be mildly unpleasant if your name was a synonym for muck, although it never seemed to deter former network anchorman Roger Mudd.
Years later, I'm sure I read in one of those "The Origins of Everything" books about Samuel Mudd's name being the cause of all this. That Mudd became a badge of excessive unpopularity. Yet in some of the obituaries of Richard Mudd in national newspapers this week, it was pointed out that "your name will be mud" was a phrase that predated Mudd's notoriety by at least several decades.
One origin suggested in The Washington Post had the term growing out of 19th-century scandal sheets sometimes called "the mud press," because such publications often sullied reputations. That's a far less entertaining story than that of Samuel Mudd, but it has a much louder ring of truth. After all, why wasn't it "Your name will be Booth"? John Wilkes Booth, the accomplished actor, not Dr. Mudd, pulled the trigger at Ford's Theatre. Is that why the police call suspects "actors"? You read it here first.
In any case, you can't help but feel pity for Richard D. Mudd, who lived to be 101 and still couldn't clear his grandfather's name. He convinced two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, of his grandfather's innocence, but both wrote him to say they lacked the legal authority to expunge Mudd's conviction from a century-old legal quagmire.
Samuel Mudd was convicted with his co-conspirators by the Hunter Commission, a military court, on the reasoning that Booth was not so much trying to assassinate the president as he was trying to eliminate the commander-in-chief of the Union army to disrupt the war effort.
Much of his grandson's efforts were directed at the Army Board for Corrections of Military Records, which eventually resulted in Mudd suing the Secretary of the Army (Mudd vs. Cadera). Two years ago, Mudd's arguments again were dismissed. That decision is being appealed.
In the amazing book "A True History of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and of the Conspiracy of 1865," released 75 years after its author's death, Louis J. Weichmann, a clerk drawn to the periphery of that conspiracy, wrote this about the morning of April 15, 1865:
"Booth and [co-conspirator David] Herold arrived at Dr. Mudd's farm at about half past four, having ridden in all about 30 miles during that eventful and bloody night, and all this time the broken bone in Booth's leg had been terribly lacerating his flesh.
"Herold rapped on the door of the house. Dr. Mudd himself opened it and assisted in bringing Booth into the house and in laying him upon a sofa in the parlor. In a short time he was carried upstairs and put on a bed in the front room. Dr. Mudd then examined Booth's leg and found that the front bone of his left leg was broken at nearly right angles about two inches above the instep. He dressed the limb as well as he could. He also gave Booth a razor, soap, and water, and with aid of these Booth removed his mustache."
Weichmann further paints Mudd as a slave owner and Southern sympathizer who eventually confessed to knowing Booth and quotes him saying to an Army officer after that confession, "Oh, there is now no hope for me."
No word on whether the officer resisted any impulse to tell Mudd what his name would be.
Gene Collier's e-mail address is gcollier@post-gazette.com
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