Colors

“Born to the Purple”

How It's Used

“Across the bay are two rocky islands known as the Isles Purpuraires, where Juba II, the Berber King of Mauritania, established a factory to manufacture purple dye from the local shellfish. Signifying nobility, the colour purple was much in demand in Rome during the first century AD—and thus originated the expression 'born to the purple.' The larger island is dominated by a formidable building, formerly a state prison and a quarantine station for pilgrims returning from Mecca.”

“Shells made people rich. The Egyptians and Cretans invented royal Tyrian purple, a dye made from crushed and boiled shells of the murex, a snail, that caught on from its inception. Phoenician traders sold murex-dyed purple cloth to the Kings of Persia and Babylon. Then noble Greeks and Romans picked up purple, which is why we say 'born to the purple.' The Christian Church followed suit; purple is the official color for the vestments of cardinals.”

“Because, make no mistake, [George W.] Bush's cabinet appointments represent the politics of calculation quite as much as—if not more than—meritocracy and multiculturalism. Since so many of Bush's new appointees are women or from minority groups, it will be much harder for Senate Democrats to withhold from them the necessary approval. Moreover, appointing individuals who were not born to the purple (as Bush himself was), but who instead owe their prominence to him, is an obvious way of buttressing cabinet loyalty. But the calculation involved in these new cabinet appointments goes deeper than this. By so strenuously encompassing diversity within his administration, Bush is further reinforcing what proved the Republicans' most potent message during the election: that he and they stand for America, that indeed they are America, while the Democrats are a party of sectional interests and half-baked elitists.”

“Born to the purple of sporting Australia [brother of Robert Rose and son of Bob Rose], Peter Rose, with no talent on the football field, is a player of great persistence and dexterity as a poet. He has all the surface qualities of a show pony but he also has something else. Sportsmen would say guts. Let's call it moral depth.”

“But that, no doubt, was part of his make-up as a natural-born Irish politician owing as much to his grandfather, 'Honey Fitz' Fitzgerald, the Mayor of Boston, as to his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, the former US Ambassador in London.

“In that sense, Teddy Kennedy was born to the purple and it says much for the ease and charm that he brought to his public that the charge of privilege never really stuck to him. For he was certainly its beneficiary—from the moment he persuaded a brighter student to take his Spanish exam for him at Harvard to the time when his elder brother, the President, saw to it that he was installed as the junior senator from Massachusetts at the time of the midterm elections of 1962 when he was only just over the qualifying age of 30 (the seat having been kept warm for him by a loyal Kennedy apparatchik).”

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