People for whom, just last month, calling senators to voice a strong opinion would likely have been “not really my thing” are this month putting that very thing first on the workaday to-do list. They are finding themselves writing postcards from their kitchen tables, waiting three hours in line without complaint to get to protest marches, using the word “pussy” in polite conversation, donating to unsexy organizations like the ACLU and Committee to Protect Journalists.
These new activists, or you of the other persuasion still reading — Does your red hot resentment demand a constant supply of liberal kindling? — or any American of any political persuasion who is interested in our history and how we’ve arrived at our current political moment, should read one of the most uncomfortable books I’ve ever read, White Trash, by historian Nancy Isenberg. It was released in June of last year, and so does not explicitly address the Donald Trump election phenomenon (though his name is invoked in reference to his reality show “Celebrity Apprentice”) but, in three hundred exhaustively researched and un-sugarcoated pages that span four hundred years, it sets the cultural stage for how an angry populace has come to have their day in the sun.
“White trash” is actually one of the less cringe-inducing insults we’ve historically given our unwanted outcast peoples since long before the Founding Fathers. (The latest iteration might be Hillary Clinton’s odd choice of “deplorables.”) The most colorful names for the poor white folk whose presence among us we’d rather not be forced to acknowledge were coined by the English aristocracy, who, back in the 1600’s, were eager to dispose of the “rubbish” of their cities by populating Virginia with these human “offscourings” (feces).
We imagine the elegant Mayflower, from which so many of us like to claim heritage, sailing the Puritans away from persecution toward more generous shores, but that was not how most of our white compatriots first got here. They were scraggly, louse-infested wretches rounded up from the slums of London and Newcastle and plopped out of sight and out of mind an ocean away. (Isenberg is nothing if not a myth-buster.)
“The English were obsessed with waste, which was why America was first and foremost a ‘wasteland’ in their eyes…To lie in waste, in biblical language, meant to exist desolate and unattended; in agrarian terms, it was to be left fallow and unimproved.” Our first settlers were waste people, landless, tenant farmers, indentured servants to the landed gentry, unimproved and unimproveable.
Yet in the Revolutionary era, the visionary Thomas Jefferson took the waste notion and ran with it in a weirdly unprecedented direction, brazenly asking his fellow Virginian aristocrats to fund the education of the smartest poor children in their state. “By this means,” he said, “twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expense, so far as these grammar schools go.” (His fellow slave-owning aristocrats, in a move that should surprise no one tuning in to our local and national education news, balked at paying for the education of rubbish children, and Jefferson’s plan was abandoned.)
From the very first, then, class has been associated with good and bad soil, with landowning versus landlessness. In Virginia, the right to vote was granted to adult white men who “had a freehold of twenty-five acres of cultivated land.” As the population fanned out into present-day Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states, we became a “cracker” country, full of landless squatters. “By 1850, in what became a common pattern in new southwestern states, at least 35 percent of the population owned no real estate.” Another of Jefferson’s visions was of yeoman farmers cultivating all that rich soil of our frontier lands; families squatting in filth were not part of his plan.
The squatting class came to be associated with five things, “1) crude habitations; 2) boastful vocabulary; 3) distrust of civilization and city folk; 4) an instinctive love of liberty (read: licentiousness); and 5) degenerate patterns of breeding.” But “he,” the iconic squatting outcast in his forest cabin, was also an “outrageous storyteller” who welcomed strangers. In other words, he had his charms, and his image was becoming more nuanced. It solidified in Andrew Jackson, our first Western president, who served from 1829-1837.
“He [Jackson] was not admired for statesmanlike qualities, which he lacked in abundance in comparison to his highly educated rivals John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. His supporters adored his rough edges, his land hunger, and his close identification with the Tennessee wilderness.” He was belligerent, crass, and uneducated. As a rogue general, in 1818 he invaded Spanish-held Florida and started a war, flouting international law. It was said that he then threatened to cut off the ears of the senators who proposed investigating his illegal behavior. (Guess whose name comes up if you Google “Which past president does Trump most resemble?”)
At the time of the Civil War — 1860 — the squatter class was a feature primarily of the slave states, though by then they’d been renamed “poor white trash,” a put-down that’s had staying power. Even Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose classic anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the second best-selling book of the century after the Bible, got in on the white trash action. Her second book — Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp —was set in the South, and featured “poor whites as a degenerate class, prone to crime, immorality and ignorance.”
During Reconstruction and into the first part of the 20th century, horse breeding was all the rage in elite circles, as were Darwin’s theories on survival of the fittest, and those of his cousin Francis Galton, on eugenics. In these scientific contexts, poor Southern whites — dependent on government assistance, prone to deformities brought on by pellagra and hookworm — were seen as an inferior breed, and efforts were made to eliminate their “unfitness.” In perhaps the most upsetting passage in the book, Isenberg describes some of the solutions proposed by the prominent eugenicists of the day, including Alexander Graham Bell.
“As in animal breeding, advocates pushed for legislation that allowed doctors and other professionals to segregate and quarantine the unfit from the general population, or they called for the castration of criminals and the sterilization of diseased and degenerate classes… Eugenicists used a broad brush to create an underclass of the unfit, calling for the unemployable to be ‘stamped out,’ as Harvard professor Frank William Taussig wrote in Principles of Economics (1921).” (But ugly joblessness, of course, has proven stubbornly resistant to stamping out. A business leader in Pittsfield told me a few years ago that there were as many job openings in the city as there were “chronically unemployable” people.)
Around the age of eugenics, “redneck” came into circulation, and found its most enthusiastic representative in Mississippi Senator and Governor James Vardaman. His supporters, poor white farmers and factory workers, proudly wore red neckerchiefs to his rallies. Vardaman was a monstrous racist; he advocated for lynching as a means of ensuring white supremacy, and when President Teddy Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House, he famously called the president, “a coon-flavored miscegenationist.”
Vardaman played up his low class reputation, once riding to a campaign rally on the back of an ox decorated with ribbons saying “redneck” and “lowdown.” Rednecks, far from humbly submitting to eradication, had evolved into a proud, unapologetic breed, relishing the disgust their obnoxious presence inspired in Harvard scientists and New York politicians.
Next come the Great Depression and New Deal years, when an influential sociologist named Howard Odum studied southern white poverty. “He was able to prove that the South had surrendered ninety-seven million acres to erosion (an area larger that the two Carolinas and Georgia); it had squandered the chances of millions of people by tolerating poverty and illiteracy; and it had ignored human potential by refusing to provide technological training, or even basic services…”
Those people, the latest iteration of white trash, came to be associated with shiftlessness, laziness, inertia, and these qualities “conflated the unwillingness to work with some innate character flaw.” The white poor’s lowly status was seen as their own damn fault, though their government had made it virtually impossible for them to become self-sustaining landowners, farmers, and citizens.
In her discussion of the developments of the last half-century Isenberg puts a name to the vicious face of the fifteen-year-old white girl standing behind the fifteen-year-old black girl walking to her newly integrated school in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. That was Hazel Bryan, who in 1958 would drop out of school, marry and live in a trailer. “Her father was a disabled veteran, unable to work; her mother held a job at the Westinghouse plant.” Neither of her parents had finished high school. Hazel is the face of southern white trash from that era; “Ignorant. Unrepentent. Congenitally cruel.”
From Elvis Presley to the “Beverly Hillbillies” to Deliverance to “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” we have had our fascination with, laughs at, and disgust with, backward, poorly educated country folk. The book ends with a look back at our push/ pull legacy when it comes to class. Our founders “insisted that the majestic continent would magically solve the demographic dilemma by reducing overpopulation and flattening out the class structure.” But the echoes of this land-of-opportunity stuff get dimmer and dimmer all the time.
Meanwhile, deafeningly loud is the stamp on the dirty deeds of our present day Republican Party. They give poor families the finger by voting in a Secretary of Education with a fat wallet and no knowledge of education, and minority citizens the finger by approving a modern-day James Vardaman in the person of Jess Sessions.
The resistance needs to resist everything about the current ruling class, especially their exclusivity. White Trash made me cringe, as did a related Facebook meme recently posted by the liberal group Occupy Democrats. It featured the familiar fear of an imaginary deplorable named Gary, and “our” response to Gary.
“ ‘They’re stealing our jobs!’ Yes, Gary, with your high school diploma. Muhammed the neurologist is stealing your job.” Among the more mean-spirited comments on the post was: “…watched an interview with the rural folks from Kentucky and they are pinning their hopes on tRump [sic] bringing back the one factory in their town! Good luck with that! Maybe if they had thought about getting an education instead of plopping out babies right and left they would have a well-paying job with secure employment.”
“We” — by which I mean the people who strive to stand in opposition to the Trumpian values of exclusivity and indifference — can’t cherry-pick which people to include and empathize with. Call them white trash, rubbish, rednecks, townies, hillbillies, or call him “Gary” from Otis, which nearly voted for Trump (Clinton won there by two points). Perhaps Gary dropped out of college because he couldn’t afford it, or he got frustrated taking remedial reading classes. His “career choice” of factory worker — or bartender or bus boy or retail clerk or gas station attendant or day laborer — is not really a choice, is it? He is our neighbor and fellow citizen, and, his inability to make a decent living in this town is due, as ever, to circumstances and attitudes and policies far outside his control, that were set in motion hundreds of years ago, which have not changed very much since then.
