![]() Lurid reports of collegiate “purity tests” continued through the ’30s. As one “little bobbed-haired blonde” slangily divulged, “An awfully pure youth is the same as a dreadful oil can or a poor fish or a terrible dumbbell. ![]() The following year, the Des Moines Registerreproduced a “purity test” that was circulating among Iowa college students, with 10 questions running from “Have you ever been drunk?” and “Do you gamble?” to “Do you make a practice of promiscuous petting?” In Des Moines, at least, the test was administered by college girls as a way of sizing up the boys, and “purity” was far from a desired quality. “Girls who have ever taken one puff or one sip or who had held hands with the boy next door, were forced to say ‘Yes’ along with those who indulged habitually,” the writer explained. A 1922 “defense of the flapper” in The Daily Home News of New Brunswick, New Jersey, described the fad at women’s colleges known as the “purity test,” intended “to discover how many girls were given to flapper habits.” “Have you ever smoked, drank, petted?” constituted typical questions. Purity tests took a decidedly less puritanical turn a decade later, when the Jazz Age ushered in a loosening of conventional morals, personified by the fun-loving flapper. If mothers trained their boys to be “pure, honest, upright and patriotic,” then when they become men, “their votes and the laws they will make will stand the purity test.” One Kansan woman wrote to The Hutchinson Daily Gazetteto oppose the amendment, arguing that there were “better ways of purifying politics” than granting women the right to vote. One early political foray for the purity test occurred in 1912, when Kansas was deciding whether to adopt an amendment to the state constitution extending full suffrage to women. Purity tests also worked their way into advertising-most famously for Ivory soap, with its slogan, first rolled out by Procter & Gamble in 1882, pledging that each bar was “99 44⁄100 percent pure.” In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, chemical testing became more commonplace in agriculture and food preparation, with “purity tests” developed to ferret out contamination in everything from plant seeds and sugarcane to wine and beer. One correspondent to Scientific American in 1864 expressed a desire for a “purity test of air” that would quantify the oxygen levels in “our densely crowded and often sickening public rooms.” In the preface to his landmark 1755 dictionary, Samuel Johnson wrote that he found “our speech copious without order, and energetic without rules,” while “adulterations were to be detected without a settled test of purity.” As a fixed phrase, purity test started showing up in the scientific literature a century later. Historically, many subjects could be tested for purity-even language itself. But a purity test suggests an even more stringent scrutiny to weed out any ideological impurities. The notion of a purity test by which candidates are measured is similar to another political metaphor drawn from chemical analysis: the litmus test. Because, you know what, the country is complicated.” “Which is why I am always suspicious of purity tests during elections. “We will not win just by increasing the turnout of the people who already agree with us completely on everything,” Obama said. In calling out the hypocrisy and divisiveness of “purity tests,” Buttigieg was echoing a sentiment recently raised by former President Barack Obama, when he assessed the Democratic-primary field at a question-and-answer session with party donors a day after the last debate. At last night’s Democratic presidential debate, the most memorable words spoken were no doubt “wine cave.” In a clash over big-dollar donors, Elizabeth Warren laid into Pete Buttigieg for a recent Silicon Valley fundraising event that she described as being “held in a wine cave, full of crystals and served $900-a-bottle wine.” Warren added, “Billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States.”īuttigieg was ready with his response, relying on a different two-word phrase: “purity tests.” After pointing out that he was “the only person on this stage who is not a millionaire or a billionaire,” he shot back at Warren: “This is the problem with issuing purity tests you cannot yourself pass.” Noting that Warren, too, has previously engaged in the same kind of big-ticket fundraising, Buttigieg concluded that “these purity tests shrink the stakes of the most important election.”
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