Etymology of “the fix is in”

Fix used in the sense you are referring to dates back to the 18th century:

• Sense of "tamper with" (a fight, a jury, etc.) is from 1790.

probably from the earlier meaning :

• "settle, assign" evolved into "adjust, arrange" (1660s), then "repair".

(Etymonline)

Ad a set phrase the earliest usage I could find is from the '40s, but earlier usages are possible:

From: Collier's, Volume 106 Crowell-Collier Publishing Company, 1940

• ... fifteen dollars on a fight in his life. "Well, here it is," the McCoy tough guy explained. "We're from New York and you're from New York and we seen you're okay. So we're out here for the fight. On business. The fix is in and the white boy wins.

Ngram: fix is in.

A variation of the expression can be found in Bernard Malamud's "The Natural," p. 203 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1952), "The fix is on." The speaker is a not-especially educated man, so the variation is probably deliberate on Malamud's part.

J.E. Lighter, Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994) reports that fix as a noun in sporting slang dates to at least 1898, and as a noun in underworld term meaning "the amount needed to secure bribed cooperation" dates to at least 1946:

fix n. 1.a. Sports. a contest having an illicitly prearranged outcome. [First two cited examples:] 1898 Sat Eve. Post (July 30) 70: As I said before, it was as clear a case of "fix" as if she had given {the runner} a drug. 1947 Schulberg Harder They Fall 246: A fight fix. ... b. Und. the amount needed to secure bribed cooperation [First cited example:] 1946 Dadswell Hey, Sucker 38: Yet if the "fix" is high the concessionaires are forced to make the public pay the bill.

Hyman Goldin, Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo (1950) has this entry for fix as a noun:

Fix, n. 1. An agreement, secured through bribery, chicanery, intimidation, whereby a criminal indictment is quashed, or the severity of a sentence or of a charge lessened. "The fix is in. Don't take no plea (plead guilty to a lesser offense). The worst you'll score for (get) is a draw (suspended sentence)." 2. Any arrangement by which laws, rules, or regulations are circumvented; or by which penalties are evaded; the alzo [setup agreement to avoid conflict with rivals or police interference]. "Mickey Mouse from uptown and his mob got a license (police permission) to hustle (steal) on the cannon (picking pockets) here. The fix is in solid.

One early newspaper article that uses the expression "the fix was in" is "Crime an Industry: Criminal Who Owns Judges and Police: Gross Income of His Gang £21,000,000 a Year," in the [Queensland] Worker (January 28, 1931), quoting at length from Fred Pasley, Al Capone: The Biography of a Self-Made Man (1930):

Capone learned slowly, and was charged with carrying weapons and threatening a humble taxi-driver. But he has already established what Chicago calls the "hookup"—the alliance of crime with the law.

"He did not even appear in Court. The charges were mysteriously dropped, expunged from the record. The fix was in. The political hook-up was functioning.

"The hook-up. The story begins and ends with it. The red thread of the Capone career is strung on it. Back of the machine and sawed-off shot-gun crews, nerving the arm of the assassin and the thug; riding at the wheel of every death car; exploiting crime and its spoils—the hook-up."

A slightly later instance, this time from a sporting context (prizefighting) appears in Bill Corum, "The 12 Hours Before the Bell," unidentified article in Hearst's International Combined with Cosmopolitan (August 1932) [snippet view]:

Facing the prospect of meeting a Jack Johnson who had sent him a last-minute warning that he was going to do his best, after it had been mutually understood that "the fix" was in, James J. Jeffries went off into the woods alone and came back a broken, beaten man on the eve of Reno's first front-page battle.

Not surprisingly, Maurice Weseen, Dictionary of American Slang (1930) includes entries for fix (as a verb) as an underworld term and "fixed fight" as a sports term:

**Fix—**To bribe.

**Fixed fight—**A prizefight in which the outcome is arranged in advance.

So whether "the fix is in" originated among gangsters or among sports aficionados, it has clearly been in use for at least ninety years.

---

Conclusions

My sense is that fix, as used in the expression "the fix is in" refers to "setting something aright" or "correcting a problem" (as seen from the point of view of the person who is arranging the fix). Indeed, fix used as a verb in an allied sense goes back to the eighteenth century, according to Lighter:

fix v. 1. Pol. & Und. to secure the cooperation of (someone) through the payment of a bribe [First five cited examples:] 1790 in [Mitford Mathews, Dictionary of Americanisms (1950)]: It is expected of us that we should fix the Governor of Pennsylvania. 1872 Burnham Secret Service 72: When Biebusch saw this man in Court, whom he fancied he had "fixed" for certain, the criminal wilted. 1872 Crapsey Nether Side 58: He had "fixed" the clerk at the lace shawl counter. 1890 Quinn Fools of Fortune 353: We found it convenient to have recourse to the scales of a Junk dealer who had been previously "fixed" for the occasion. 1902 Hapgood Thief 81 {ref. to ca1885} The reliable attorney got a bondman, and two friends of his "fixed" the cops, who made no complaints.

The trajectory of usage seems to have been first fix as a verb meaning to bribe a politician, then as a verb meaning to bribe accomplices or police officers, then as a noun in sports lingo to refer to a dishonestly contested sporting event whose result was settled in advance through payment of a bribe, then as a noun in underworld slang referring to a judicial proceeding similarly predetermined, and finally as part of the longer expression "the fix is in" either in a sporting or underworld sense (or in both simultaneously) as a way of announcing or describing such an arrangement.