Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

Grrr. Babbitt is online, bit "onward and upward" does not appear in it.

Uncle.

I got writin' to do.
 

Shucked is purty good. Aw-shucked is, too.

Personally, I like Corn-holed.
 

Ha!

How 'bout:

All Shucked Up

]:->
 

Fanny Crosby hymn, 1876, Onward, Upward.

And, I found reference to the phrase in a book by Gershon Brin: "The Concept of Time and Distance as Referenced in the Bible and Dead Sea Scrolls." (Brill 2001) Quoting from Genesis, Numbers and Judges.

(link: Brin review )
 

Sounds familiar otherwise as well.
Not to complicate anything but....

"Ever onward, ever upward Gently held in Love's embrace Till we reach Nirvana's summit And behold Truth face to face."

Buddhist Hymns Library

http://www.mahindarama.com/geebees/hymns-library.htm
 

Or how about this one:
State motto of New York:"Excelsior"
Latin for "onward and upward" or "ever onward, ever upward"
 

Look up excelsior and you get a lot of hits on onward and upward usage
 

Well, this seems authoritative:

http://www.phrases.org.uk
/bulletin_board/48/messages
/1085.html


What I'm a wonderin' is when did it start to become trite and cliched? The uses I've seen in old papers, editors use it without hint of awareness of cliche. ... I think it was probably fairly untrite in 1907 ... Would Oklahoma's state builders, boomers and business peeps used the phrase, seriously, in our statehood year??
 

I suspect Horace Greeley probably used some form of the expression in his support of westward expansion.
 

Ha! I actually found it. Here's a Greeley quote:

There were both Transcendentalist and anti-trinitarian elements in Greeley's Universalism. Among his friends were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Greeley had a Transcendentalist belief that "an Omniscient Beneficence presides over and directs the entire course of human affairs, leading ever onward and upward to universal purity and bliss, and all evil becomes phenomenal and preparative."

(found here: Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography.
 

Awesome. So, then, I'd say that use of the phrase, enlivened by Longfellow in the 1840s and Whitman in the 1850s, was common at midcentury among those who 1., accepted or at least did not feel threatened by Darwin; 2., looked to science for many, if not most of the immediate questions of life (a la Auguste Comte); 3. had positive feelings about capitalism specifically fueled generally by the American notion of Manifest Destiny; and later, 4. clung to a rudimentary framework of belief or at least organized religion, as in Unitarian-Universalist, OR, Henry Ward Beecher's brand of enlightened congregationalism; and 5. predated the rise of Pentecostalism and Fundamentalism, which, started with the Azusa Street Revival in L.A. in 1906.

And that's close enough to 1907 for me, absent any deeper research, to be nervous about generally attributing "Onward and Upward" to anyone in Oklahoma during its statehood year of 1907, especially considering the rise of Pentecostalism, paired at the hip, as wack as it sounds now, with Socialism in Oklahoma.

And all this, for me to decide whether to use a general anecdotal reference in the third graf of an otherwise solidly researched 1,008-word article. :-)

And the media-hating bastards think we don't do our homework!

They can eat my effing shorts.
 

Yeah! What you said! Just don't let them know how much fun research is.
 

Visitmyblog@shamelessplug.com
 

Of course that was a 19th century feeling of manifest destiny, of Lady Liberty leading the pioneers in the westward prgress of civilization. See the McCormick Reaper Adds at the turn of the 20th century. Oklahoma was not immuned were we?

By the way that reminds me of the old jole about the school kid who was assigned an essay on the effect of American inventions. He wrote: McCormick invented the mechanical raper and put a lot of men out of work.
 

HA!!!!