Review
of "White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America" by
Nancy Isenberg
By Carlos Lozada June
23
By Nancy Isenberg
Viking. 460 pp. $28
If slavery is America’s original sin,
class may be its hidden one.
It is part of our national creed that the
opportunity to achieve and improve ourselves is not predetermined at birth;
that upward mobility, while hard, is possible. We are not the British, after
all, trapped in some “Downton Abbey” hell of self-aware stratification — we
rebelled against all that, right?
Nancy Isenberg, a professor of history at
Louisiana State University, has authored a gritty and sprawling assault on this
aspect of American mythmaking. Ours is very much a class-based society, she
argues, and had been long before Occupy Wall Street or Bernie Sanders, long
before we were a country at all. In “White
Trash” Isenberg takes a very particular look at class in the United States,
examining the white rural outcasts whom politicians from Andrew Jackson to
Donald Trump have sought to rally, but who otherwise have remained vilified,
shunned, targeted and kept apart, both physically — in poorhouses and trailer
parks, through eugenic science and discriminatory public policy — and in the
nation’s cultural imagination, where they have inspired mockery, kitsch and
unceasing grimaces.
“The white poor
have been with us in various guises, as the names they have been given across
the centuries attest,” Isenberg writes. “Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers.
Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tackies.
Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White n—–s.
Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people.”
Isenberg looks upon old American
traditions and scoffs, reinterpreting history through the prism of class divisions
among the country’s white population, one more caste system in the land of the
free. Colonial America, for instance, was “a place where the surplus poor, the
waste people of England, could be converted into economic assets.” England’s
most destitute city dwellers were sent here — including children, shipped to
the colonies in a practice known as “spiriting” — creating a class of white
laborers that served as “disposable property,” Isenberg recounts. “Among these
unheroic transplants were roguish highwaymen, mean vagrants, Irish rebels,
known whores, and an assortment of convicts shipped to the colonies for grand
larcenies or other property crimes.” Not to Isenberg’s taste are the kindly
tales of Puritans and Plymouth Rock, of John Smith and Pocahontas at Jamestown.
The nation’s founders, already judged for
their hypocrisy on slavery, fare little better here on class. During the
revolution, George Washington stated that only “the lower class of people”
should serve as foot soldiers, while Thomas Jefferson considered importing
German immigrants to the colonies, hoping to improve the work ethic — and the
breeding stock — of farmers and laborers. “The circumstance of superior beauty
is thought worthy of attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and
other animals,” the Virginian planter noted, adding, “why not in that of man?”
Terms such as “cracker” and “squatter”
began as Americanisms that brought pejorative English notions of idleness and
vagrancy to this side of the Atlantic, where they served as a shorthand for
landless migrants. Land undergirds the enduring class hierarchy, Isenberg
stresses; then, as today, property ownership determines the social pecking
order. “Hereditary titles may have gradually disappeared,” she explains, “but
large land grants and land titles remained central to the American system of
privilege.”
By the 1830s and 1840s, the “squatter”
had become “fully a symbol of partisan politics, celebrated as the iconic
common man who came to epitomize Jacksonian democracy,” Isenberg writes. Taking
and clearing land through violence and extra-legal tactics, Jackson emerges as
“the political heir of the cracker and squatter.” New and benign versions would
reappear in presidential politics, whether with Jimmy Carter (who once quoted a
supporter calling him “white trash made good”), Bill Clinton (a self-described
Elvis-loving “Bubba,” whose White House dalliances led to a “white trash outing
on the grand national stage”) or Sarah Palin, whom Isenberg depicts as
“one-half hockey mom and one-half hot militia babe.”
It should hardly surprise that “White
Trash” focuses on white people, and Isenberg lingers on how, even among whites,
perceived differences in skin color signaled a class split. Nineteenth-century
cultural commentators, she writes, often derided the “unnatural complexions” of
the white lower classes, with their flesh the color of “yellow parchment” and
their copious offspring bearing a “cadaverous, bloodless look.” And from skin
hue, it was a short jump to supposed congenital and cognitive disparities.
“More than tallow-colored skin, it was the permanent mark of intellectual
stagnation, the ‘inert’ minds, the ‘fumbling’ speech,” Isenberg writes. After
the Civil War, “hardworking blacks were suddenly the redeemed ones,” while poor
whites remained “undeveloped, evolutionarily stagnant creatures.”
Throughout this book, such references to
race are fleeting and awkward, appearing in parentheticals or occasional
asides. At a time when so much of the national debate over inequality centers on
racial divides, Isenberg maintains that “class has its own singular and
powerful dynamic, apart from its intersection with race.” Still, it’s hard to
skirt over race when dissecting class in America. At times, the author
justifies her choice by implying a sort of equivalence of hardship, as when she
emphasizes that Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs “targeted both urban
ghettos and impoverished white areas of Appalachia” (the italics are
Isenberg’s) or when she argues, somewhat improbably, that in the 1920s poor
whites “found their lot comparable to suffering African Americans when it came
to the justice system.”
Isenberg even reinterprets the Civil War
as a class struggle alongside a racial one: Northerners looked down on poor
Southern whites as proving that reliance on slavery weakened free white
workers; Confederates countered that the North debased itself by relying on
white labor for menial tasks. “It is no exaggeration to say that in the grand
scheme of things,” Isenberg contends, “Union and Confederate leaders saw the
war as a clash of class systems wherein the superior civilization would reign
triumphant.” (Tip: Whenever a sentence begins with “It is no exaggeration to
say that . . .” you can safely assume that the rest of the sentence contains
an exaggeration.)
“White Trash” features a fascinating
exploration of the cultural portrayals of its subject. Sitcoms from the 1960s
such as “Gomer
Pyle, U.S.M.C.”
and “The
Beverly Hillbillies” show how the underclass has long produced more
amusement than concern or respect. The Ewell family in Harper Lee’s “To
Kill a Mockingbird” (1960) may be American literature’s purest distillation
of white trash, Isenberg writes, emblematic of how “ ‘redneck’ had come to be
synonymous with an almost insane bigotry.” The 1972 film “Deliverance”,
based on James Dickey’s novel and featuring rape and murder in backwoods
Georgia, offers a devastating vision of rustic Southern life. And despite a
sort of “redneck chic” phase in the 1980s and 1990s, Isenberg laments the
continued “gawking at rural Georgian white trashdom” in TLC’s “Here
Comes Honey Boo Boo” and similar shows.
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“We are a country that imagines itself as
democratic, and yet the majority has never cared much for equality,” Isenberg
concludes. “Because that’s not how breeding works. Heirs, pedigree, lineage: a
pseudo-aristocracy of wealth still finds a way to assert its social power.”
The irony of the Trump presidential
campaign — and I confess, the compulsion to read Trumpian implications into any
new book has become irresistible — is that the candidate personifies that very
pseudo-aristocracy of wealth that has long shunned the white working class, yet
he draws his greatest support from it. And that Trump amassed his fortune as a
real estate developer, when land and property for so long have marked the red
lines between rich and poor, well, that’s just icing.
In an echo of arguments by Thomas Frank
and others, Isenberg worries that today we once again are seeing “a large
unbalanced electorate that is regularly convinced to vote against its
collective self-interest.” Voters are persuaded through fear-filled messages
and a false sense of identity, but a certain kind of communicator helps, too.
Isenberg tells the 1840 story “The
Arkansas Traveler,” in which a politician campaigning for office stops in
the backcountry and asks a squatter for refreshment and support. The squatter
“had to be wooed for his vote,” Isenberg writes. “He had no patience for a
candidate who refused to speak his language.” So the man dismounts his horse,
takes the squatter’s fiddle and shows he can play his kind of music. “Once the
politician returned to the mansion, however, nothing had changed in the life of
the squatter.”
Trump, if nothing else, has shown he
knows how to play that fiddle.
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