[A humble request: If you can, please donate to help me carry on tracing word histories. Thank you.]
The American-English slang noun scumbag designates a base, despicable person. The earliest occurrences that I have found of scumbag used in this sense date back to 1953—cf., below, quotations 1, 2 & 3.
But the primary meaning of the noun scumbag is: a condom—here, the noun scum is slang for semen. The earliest recorded occurrence of this use of the noun scumbag in the Oxford English Dictionary (June 2024, s.v. scumbag) is from Dictionary of American Slang (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1967), compiled and edited Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner [Supplement by Stuart Berg Flexner: page 703, column 1]:
scum [taboo] n. Semen; “jism”; “come.”
scumbag [taboo] n. A condom; “rubber.”
Therefore, scumbag in the sense of a condom was recorded in print only after this noun appeared in published form in the sense of a base, despicable person: this most probably is due to the sexual connotations attached to the former sense.
These are, in chronological order, the earliest occurrences of the noun scumbag that I have found:
1-: From the column Report from Washington, by Allen Cromley, published in The Daily Oklahoman (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA) of Sunday 19th July 1953 [page B-1, column 1]:
—Context: Mike Monroney (1902-1980), U.S. Senator from Oklahoma from 1951 to 1969, opposed McCarthyism, i.e., the policy of identifying (suspected) Communists and removing them from government departments or other positions, as pursued by Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957), U.S. Senator from Wisconsin from 1947 to 1957:
Washington, July 18—[…]
[…]
It was the Republican Wisconsin senator’s plan to investigate CIA that prompted Monroney into taking the floor Monday to deliver a caustic denunciation of McCarthy’s methods.
He followed this up Thursday with another floor appearance, during which he inserted in the Congressional Record some of the adverse mail he had received.
This was a turnabout. Legislators seldom quote the bad things people say about them. But it was Monroney’s reasoning that publication of vituperative pro-McCarthy letters would reveal the logic (or rather lack of logic) among McCarthy followers.
Monroney was variously described as a “scumbag,” “SOB,” “Snake,” “dead sheep,” “cheap, poor politician,” “murderer,” “traitor,” “communist,” and assorted unprintable adjectives.
2-: From one of the letters that Mike Monroney inserted in the Congressional Record, published in the North Star (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA) of Thursday 23rd July 1953 [page 7, columns 3 & 4]:
—Context: In 1948, the U.S. government official Alger Hiss (1904-1996) was accused of spying for the Soviet Union. Herbert Lehman (1878-1963), U.S. Senator from New York from 1949 to 1957, was an opponent of Joseph McCarthy. Julius Rosenberg (1918-1953) and his wife Ethel (1914-1953) were executed for passing information about nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union. An analyst for the U.S. Department of Justice, Judith Coplon (1921-2011) was a spy for the Soviet Union:
New York, N. Y.
Don’t let them investigate that scum bag who donated to the Alger Hiss defense fund. If they do they may discover that Herb Lehman, you, and a lot of more scum bags like you also contributed. We must keep the truth hidden. Hurray for the Rosenbergs, Judy Coplon, Hiss, and you.
(Unsigned).
3-: From a correspondence from Washington, District of Columbia, by George H. Hall, published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri, USA) of Thursday 30th July 1953 [page B-1, column 1]:
The strange world inhabited by extremist devotees of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (Rep.), Wisconsin, is strikingly illuminated in the flood of “pan” mail being received by Senator Mike Monroney (Dem.), Oklahoma.
[…]
Among other things, some of which cannot be printed, Monroney was called “deadly traitor,” “big ham,” “dear stupid,” “silly ass,” “disgusting personality,” “oakie,” “screwball,” “cur,” “bum,” and scum bag.”
4-: On several occasions in 1956 and 1957, The Hermes (the student newspaper of Dana College, Blair, Nebraska, USA) mentioned a basketball team called the Scumbags, competing in the intramural cage league.
5-: From Poetry Series Makes Bow, by Fred S. Holley, published in The Virginian-Pilot and The Portsmouth Star (Norfolk, Portsmouth, South Norfolk, Virginia , USA) of Sunday 26th November 1961 [Entertainment: page F-6, column 1]; the following is about The End, and Other Poems (New York, Pineapple Press, 1961), by the U.S. poet Robert Mitchell—however, here, the noun scumbag is not applied to a person, but to “an era’s end”:
Out of “the fist-fight of the subways” (a fine figure of speech) Mitchell ponders what he regards as “these last shattered days” (and who is to deny that he may be right?) and demands indignantly: “Why grovel in the scumbag of an era’s end?”
6-: From From nouveau hip to folk rock, by Barrie Hale, about the U.S. singer and songwriter Bob Dylan (Robert Allen Zimmerman – born 1941), published in The Telegram (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) of Saturday 13th November 1965 [The Telegram Showcase: page 3, column 3]:
The new Dylan, or as he has it, the Real Dylan emerged in the spring of this year. The Nouveau Hip was outraged at the rock ’n roll backing. At the Forest Hills concert, they screamed insults at him, calling him, at one point, A Scum Bag. To which he murmured, Aw, c’mon now. The hippies really weren’t listening. The rock sound which he has assumed from English groups [such] as The Rolling Stones has given him a stronger, more direct delivery. The wild (and often, it seems, fortuitous) imagery of the lyrics is still there.
7-: From The Drama of St. Dismas, by Suzanne Barrett, published in The Sunday News (Ridgewood, New Jersey, USA) of Sunday 29th September 1968 [page 43, columns 1 & 2]:
Wednesday I spent two hours with in-patient drug addicts in a group therapy session, part of the rehabilitation program at St. Dismas Hospital for narcotic and drug addicts in Paterson […].
[…]
Some of these guys have spent more time in jail and rehabilitation than they spent on any formal education, and they are not ghetto boys. Why should the rest of society give a damn about this kind of low life anyway? Why should our tax dollar go to try and cure some self-made scumbag who helps finance organized crime, who would turn-on our sons and daughters, who drives a car when he’s shot so high he could fly, who steals from us to support his habit? Why indeed!
[…]
Now we’re talking about sick people, not low-life scumbags. We always were talking about human beings.
8-: From the following advertisement, published in the Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, California, USA) of Monday 7th October 1968 [Times Classified Ads: page 2, column 1]:
PERSONALS
[…]
NEGATIVE SCUMBAGS—Why don’t you come home? The boys on Ramsgate Rd.
9-: From Battling, Book-Selling Brothers-in-Law Have Countercharges Referred to Jury, published in The Herald-News (Passaic-Clifton, New Jersey, USA) of Thursday 9th January 1969 [page 23, column 4]:
Passaic—Two “dream book” and magazine salesmen were held yesterday to await action by the Passaic County Grand Jury on a charge that they assaulted one another in a Burgess Place candy store.
[…]
[…] One is Claude C. Greene, […] who said his sister is married to the other defendant, Victor Lalli […].
[…]
On the afternoon of Nov. 26, 1968, Greene testified, he visited the store and was selling “dream books” to the store owner. He was inside the store two or three minutes when Lalli, his brother-in-law, entered, Greene said.
Lalli said he confronted Greene and asked: “What are you doing here, scumbag?”
10-: From a letter to The World-Herald Teen Pulse, by ‘TTS’, published in the Omaha World-Herald (Omaha, Nebraska, USA) of Friday 4th April 1969 [page 20, column 1]:
Mickey Mouser-type KOIL bans the Doors from any air play—“in the interest of their listening audience.”
But if the Doors are really such gougers, grogans, sloths, toads, scumbags, maggots, etc., why were they elected the top group of 1968 in a recent music poll?
11-: From a letter to the Editor, published in The Daily Item (Sunbury, Pennsylvania, USA) of Friday 23rd May 1969 [page 2, column 2]:
Selinsgrove, Pa.
May 13, 1969
Editor, Daily Item:
I for one would like to know why those “communist scumbags” should rate the front page of The Daily Item, burning their draft cards. I would much rather see on the front page, them being shot before a firing squad for high treason. They are lower than pig litter.
Very disgustedly yours,
R. L. Delbaugh
12-: From Bill Graham—‘Sick and Tired’, by John L. Wasserman, published in the San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, California, USA) of Friday 22nd August 1969 [page 45, column 6]:
—Context: The Light Artists Guild, a San Francisco counterculture collective, demanded a pay rise from the concert promoter Bill Graham (1931-1991). The Fillmore Auditorium is a concert venue in San Francisco:
Bill Graham […] has quit. The Fillmore Auditorium is finished.
[…]
[…] The straw that broke the camel’s back happened August 5 at a meeting, called by the recently-formed Light Artists Guild, which represents a number of the ballroom light shows.
Graham is not renowned for his reticence, but he really flipped that Tuesday night. “I’m —— sick and tired of four years of POINTING,” Graham spat a couple of days ago. […]
[…]
“So I said ‘—— you, you scum bags . . . you want to make more money, you want to drive a nice car? GO TO WORK! You lean on a crutch—art. You say I screwed you? I want any man in this room to step forward and say, ‘You screwed me, Bill Graham. I’ll give you my business. ONE of you.’ Nobody did.”
word histories 