right stuff

Today the phrase the right stuff is inextricably linked to test pilots and astronauts, thanks to Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book The Right Stuff and the 1983 Hollywood movie made from it about the early years of the U.S. space program. The right stuff is that ineffable quality that makes one right for a particular job, a combination of skill, determination, audacity, and intelligence, along with properly tempered ambition. But Wolfe was not the first to use the phrase in this sense; far from it.

The phrase can be found as far back as 1748 in the sense of an alcoholic drink, but the application to human qualities is first found in Samuel Foote’s 1778 play A Trip to Calais, where the right stuff is used to refer to the qualities that make a young man a hard-partying man-about-town, and given the earlier sense, implies that the men may not be drunk enough:

Yes, yes, they look of that cut; not of the right stuff, as the French say, to make bucks desprits on.

A century later, James Fenimore Cooper uses the phrase in the sense familiar to us today in a biographical sketch of Edward Preble which appeared in Graham’s American Monthly Magazine in May 1845. Preble was the naval officer who commanded the blockade of and assault on Tripoli during the First Barbary War, an operation perhaps best known from the reference to the “shores of Tripoli” in the Marines’ Hymn. Cooper writes about a boyhood incident where, during a boating party, Preble threw stones at a boat containing his father, General Jedediah Preble:

Many anecdotes are related of the boyhood of young Preble, all tending to prove his courage, determination and high temper. On one occasion, his father was about to go on an excursion to the neighboring islands, with a party of gentlemen, and the boy was denied a place in the boat, on account of his tender years. In order to get rid of his importunities, his father gave Edward a task, which it was thought could not possibly be completed in time, with promise that he should go, did he get through with it. The boy succeeded, and, to his father’s surprise, appeared on the shore, claiming the promised place in the boat. This was still denied him, under the pretext that there was not room. Finding the party about to shove off without him, young Preble, then about ten years of age, commenced hostilities by making an attack with stones picked up on the wharf, peppering the party pretty effectually before his laughing father directed a capitulation. It seems the old general decided that the boy had the “right stuff” in him, and overlooked the gross impropriety of the assault, on account of its justice and spirit.

While the anecdote is too perfect to be true, a hagiographic illustration of the boyhood of a future naval hero, Cooper is using the phrase in exactly the same sense that Wolfe would over a century later.

Other writers have used the phrase over the years prior to Tom Wolfe, most notably Virginia Woolf, who wrote in The Voyage Out in 1915:

He told me all about his life, and his struggles, and how fearfully hard it had been. D’you know, he was boy in a grocer’s shop and took parcels to people’s houses in a basket? That interested me awfully, because I always say it doesn’t matter how you’re born if you’ve got the right stuff in you.

Sources:

Cooper, James Fenimore. “Sketches of Naval Men. Edward Preble.” Graham’s Magazine, 27.5, May 1845, 205–15 at 206. Archive.org.

Foote, Samuel. A Trip to Calais. London: T. Sherlock for T. Cadell, 1778, 25. Archive.org. (The OED gives a 1775 date for this play, which I believe is in error. Foote published a prose piece of the same title that year.)

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2010, s.v. right, adj. & int.

Woolf, Virginia. The Voyage Out. London: Duckworth, 1915, 224. Archive.org.

Photo credit: NASA, 1961. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.