Sometimes you’ll see a story about some person or group “barnstorming”, which means touring around an area — possibly the whole US — making brief stops for whatever their specialty happens to be. A band could hold a barnstorming concert tour; a political candidate could barnstorm around giving speeches, and so forth.
If you look at the word itself, though, “barnstorming” doesn’t seem to make any sense. It’s clearly a compound word, but what do barns and storming have to do with each other? You could “storm” a barn in a military sense of an attack, like “storming a castle, but why would you want to? The answer, as many answers do, lies in the past, where “barnstorming” originated.
Nowadays “barnstorming” often evokes airplane pilots from the early days of flight. They would fly from one rural town or county to another, attracting a paying audience to see aerobatic tricks and even go for plane rides. The pilots were “barnstorming” and were called “barnstormers.” Even though that’s probably the primary modern association with barnstorming, early 20th-century pilots were not the original barnstormers; they simply inherited the label.
“Barnstorming” appeared in the early 1800s, and applied to traveling troupes of actors. They would, like the pilots a century later, travel from one town to another staging plays. Regional and “summer” theaters still advertise a production featuring a known actor who typically appears in major productions in a major city (“…and featuring Broadway star Jane Doe, fresh from her triumph in the hit musical ‘Singing Lichens’…”). In the19th century, traveling troupes did exactly the same thing. An item published in 1883 reads: “Miss Helen Bancroft, who recently played in this city, was announced as with a barn-storming company.”
The traveling theater companies would stage their productions in barns. Being actors, they were well acquainted with the literary use of “storm”, such as Keats’ 1820 stanza: “A hundred swords / Will storm his heart, / Love’s feverous citadel.” They adopted the term themselves in the sense that they needed to “conquer” a barnful of people watching their play. Thus as far as we can tell, “barnstorming” was coined by the original barnstormers themselves. By the time aviation came along, the term was no longer closely associated with actual barns, but only a series of (usually) rural locales — which, being rural, probably had barns, even if whatever the new barnstormers did, whether running for office or flying airplanes, wasn’t related in the least to barns.
If the barnstormer in question is a politician, one term that might come up in a “stump speech” (which originally was literally a speech given while standing on a tree stump so people could see you). If they got elected, they might get involved with something (not pork) called “pork” or “pork barrel.” The term refers to political corruption of a sort — when elected, a politician would travel to the state or federal capital and try to pass legislation that, while (possibly) wasteful or silly, gave outsize benefit to their own constituents. The unequal value is “pork,” and the activity is “pork barreling”.
One of the types of residents in a rural barn might be pigs. Like everything else in the barn, they were kept by farmers as a food supply. In the 1700s and 1800s, food preservation technology being what it was, many provisions were stored in barrels — including a family’s stored meat, including pork. Pork was a highly important source of protein in the rural US at the time, such that the volume of pork in your pork barrel was used as an informal measurement of wealth. James Fenimore Cooper, in 1845, wrote: “I hold a family to be in a desperate way, when the mother can see the bottom of the pork barrel.”
So in the 1800s, a politician barnstorming around the rural US would be likely to boast — completely without irony — that if elected he would “fill your pork barrels.” He probably wasn’t speaking inside a barn, if there was a storm it was only by coincidence, and he wasn’t really talking about pork, barrels, or pigs, but that’s English for you.
