put the bottom rail on top
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put the bottom rail on top (third-person singular simple present puts the bottom rail on top, present participle putting the bottom rail on top, simple past and past participle put the bottom rail on top)
- (idiomatic) To reverse a hierarchy.
- 1906–1909, Walter Hines Page, The Southerner, a Novel[1], Doubleday, Page & Company, page 253:
- “The nigger Professor” they called me, “with a plan to educate the blacks and to put them above the whites”; “to put the bottom rail on top”; “to subvert Anglo‐Saxon civilization.”