I have always vaguely wondered how far back that famous phrase goes, and Dave Wilton has done the relevant spadework at Wordorigins:
The phrase take me to your leader is a science fiction cliché, so much so that in the 2007 “Voyage of the Damned” Christmas episode of Doctor Who the time-traveling, title character said, “Take me to your leader! I’ve always wanted to say that!” (Another phrase in that episode that the good doctor always wanted to say was “Allons-y Alonso!”)
The current popularity of the phrase and its application to extraterrestrials and flying saucers dates to the 1950s, but the phrase itself is considerably older. The first known application of a variant of the phrase to first contact with extraterrestrials dates to 21 March 1953 and a cartoon by Alex Graham that appeared in the New Yorker (shown here). The cartoon depicts a flying saucer that has landed in a field and two aliens talking to a horse, saying, “Kindly take us to your President!”
We see the phrase in its familiar form in an Associated Press article from 21 August 1956 that reported on the Republican National Convention in San Francisco:
One delegate, intrigued by an outer-space type of portable transmitter in the hands of a network reporter, walked up and demanded, “Take me to your leader.”
But the 10 October 1956 issue of Variety also reports on this incident, calling it “the old space-man gag,” indicating that the catchphrase was already well associated with UFOs.
And before the extraterrestrial invasion of our popular culture, the phrase appears quite often in adventure fiction dating back to the nineteenth century.
Click through for the 19th-century quotes, and of course for the cartoon. My curiosity is now satisfied. (For a related joke, see Dan Milton’s joke here; I quoted “Allons-y, Alonso!” in 2022.)
I take it there’s no need even to mention Tom Lehrer’s version (marred by a typo in the previous line: “one” should be “once”).
I was interested to see at the home page there that Lehrer put all his songs into the public domain.
And “said” should be “sad”.
The heroine gets to say this in the enjoyable (if just a wee bit dark) novel Overgrowth by Mira Grant (i.e. Seanan McGuire.)
Well, she has been telling everyone that she is an alien plant disguised as a human being, and the vanguard of an invasion fleet, ever since she was a three-year-old child …
It honestly feels like “president” instead of “leader” doesn’t quite count, though I’m sure it took a while for crystalize. But if that’s allowed, here is Planet Stories, Spring 1950.
@Jerry Friedman: Lehrer wanted people who cared to enjoy his music. He stopped performing after fewer than a hundred shows and would have been happy to work as a teaching assistant at Harvard for the rest of his life. He had no dependents and was comfortable enough for himself financially. One of his younger friends, who was hoping to write a biography of Lehrer, discovered Lehrer had his reel-to-reel master tapes just sitting around his home, and Lehrer told him to take them. He wasn’t doing anything with them, so it was better they go to a friend who might have a use for them.
The google books corpus seems to have exactly four 19th-century instances of the phrase other than the one quoted, although I guess “quite often … dating back to the nineteenth century” is strategically vague as to how much of the “dating back” period is in fact in 1899 or earlier.
One of those other 19th century hits is in _Whoso Findeth a Wife_ (1897), by William Le Queux, which turns out to be quite a treasure trove of genre prose style. Consider from elsewhere in the book these three consecutive sentences:
“In a instant I recognised the features, although I had only seen them once before. It was the foppish young man who had been Ella’s companion on that lonely walk in Kensington Gardens. Why he had visited the Earl was an inscrutable mystery.”
I find that striking because it doesn’t sound at all non-“period” for 1897 but you could stick the same sentences into a simlar-genre work from 1947 or 1957 or maybe even more recently and it wouldn’t necessarily sound hopelessly anachronistic yet …
Wordorigins offers only a single quote predating the 1953 UFO example. I trust Dave Wilton’s research but he needs to show his work. I wonder if a section was omitted in error from the published version.
On Google Books I found JWB’s pre-1900 matches but zero matches from 1900 to 1950; but then Google Books search has been gradually decaying into uselessness for years. On archive.org I found a few more matches, most interestingly a 1926–32 translation of Eusebius Ecclesiastical History III xxiii ἐπὶ τὸν ἄρχοντα ὑμῶν ἀγάγετέ με
Always good to find a locus classicus. I see, by the way, that John the Apostle’s son was adopted.
But was John an alien?
Ask Erich von Däniken, he should know.
ulr : Erich von Däniken died last month.
The variant “take us to your leader” gets a few more bites, the earliest of which is an 1874 historical novel, W.H. Ainsworth’s Merry England: or, Nobles and serfs. Also, from 1919, James Gordon’s The scouts of the Santee, or, Redcoats and Whigs (in Pluck and Luck: Complete Stories of Adventure), and a 1944 Scorchy Smith comic strip, set in wartime Italy.
There are also various examples with “chief”, mostly in cheesy stories about Indians.
Ain’t it the truth. The GB search function stopped working entirely for a day or two last week (Feb. 2-3): no results returned for any text search.