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White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg
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The New York Times Besteller, with a new preface from the author
“This estimable book rides into the summer doldrums like rural electrification. . . . It deals in the truths that matter.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“This eye-opening investigation into our country’s entrenched social hierarchy is acutely relevant.”—O, The Oprah Magazine
“White Trash will change the way we think about our past and present.”
—T. J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Custer’s Trials
In her groundbreaking bestselling history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg, #4 on the 2016 Politico 50 list, takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing—if occasionally entertaining—poor white trash.
“When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win,” says Isenberg of the political climate surrounding Sarah Palin. And we recognize how right she is today. Yet the voters that put Trump in the White House have been a permanent part of our American fabric, argues Isenberg.
The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement to today's hillbillies. They were alternately known as “waste people,” “offals,” “rubbish,” “lazy lubbers,” and “crackers.” By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called “clay eaters” and “sandhillers,” known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds.
Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics–-a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity.
We acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class as well.
- Sales Rank: #5616 in Books
- Published on: 2017-04-04
- Released on: 2017-04-04
- Original language: English
- Dimensions: 8.40" h x 1.00" w x 5.40" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 496 pages
Review
“Formidable and truth-dealing…necessary.” – The New York Times
“This eye-opening investigation into our country’s entrenched social hierarchy is acutely relevant.” –O Magazine
“A gritty and sprawling assault on…American mythmaking.” —Washington Post
“An eloquent synthesis of the country’s history of class stratification.” –The Boston Globe
“A bracing reminder of the persistent contempt for the white underclass.” –The Atlantic
“[White Trash] sheds bright light on a long history of demagogic national politicking, beginning with Jackson. It makes Donald Trump seem far less unprecedented than today’s pundits proclaim.”—Slate
“Isenberg . . . has written an important call for Americans to treat class with the same care that they now treat race…Her work may well help that focus lead to progress.” —TIME
“With her strong academic background and accessible voice, Isenberg takes pains to reveal classism’s deep-seated roots.”–Entertainment Weekly
“Carefully researched…deeply relevant.” –Christian Science Monitor
About the Author
Nancy Isenberg is the author of Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in Biography and won the Oklahoma Book Award for best book in Nonfiction. She is the coauthor, with Andrew Burstein, of Madison and Jefferson. She is the T. Harry Williams Professor of American History at LSU, and writes regularly for Salon.com. Isenberg is the winner of the 2016 Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and was #4 on the 2016 Politico 50 list. She lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Charlottesville, Virginia.
From the Hardcover edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Clinton’s embarrassing second term didn’t seem to provide lessons, insofar as the Republicans plunged ahead with their own (effectively) white trash candidate in 2008, Alaska governor Sarah Palin. The devastatingly direct Frank Rich of the New York Times referred to the Republican ticket as “Palin and McCain’s Shotgun Marriage.” Did the venerable John McCain of Arizona, ordinarily a savvy politician, have a lapse in judgment here? Slate produced an online video of Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, painting it as a forgettable wasteland, a place “to get gas and pee” before getting back on the road. Wasilla was elsewhere described as the “punch line for most redneck jokes told in Anchorage.” Erica Jong wrote in the Huffington Post, “White trash America certainly has allure for voters,” which explains the photoshopped image of Palin that appeared on the Internet days after her nomination. In a stars-and-stripes bikini, holding an assault rifle and wearing her signature black-rimmed glasses, Palin was one-half hockey mom and one-half hot militia babe.
News of the pregnancy of Palin’s teenage daughter Bristol led to a shotgun engagement to Levi Johnston, which was arranged in time for the Republican National Convention. Us Weekly featured Palin on the cover, with the provocative title, “Babies, Lies, and Scandal.” Maureen Dowd compared Palin to Eliza Doolittle of My Fair Lady fame, in getting prepped for her first off-script television interview. Could there be any more direct allusion to her questionable class origins? The Palin melodrama led one journalist to associate the Alaska clan with the plot of a Lifetime television feature. The joke was proven true to life two years later, when the backwoods candidate gave up her gig as governor and starred in her own reality TV show, titled Sarah Palin’s Alaska.
Palin’s candidacy was a remarkable event on all accounts. She was only the second female of any kind and the first female redneck to appear on a presidential ticket. John McCain’s advisers admitted that she had been selected purely for image purposes, and they joined the chorus trashing the flawed candidate after Obama’s historic victory. Leaks triggered a media firestorm over Palin’s wardrobe expense account. An angry aide categorized the Palins’ shopping spree as “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast.”
The Alaskan made an easy and attractive target. Journalists were flabbergasted when she showed no shame in displaying astounding lapses in knowledge. Her bungled interview with NBC host Katie Couric represented more than gotcha journalism: Palin didn’t just misconstrue facts; she came across as a woman who was unable to articulate a single complex idea. (The old cracker slur as “idle-headed” seemed to fit.) But neither did Andrew Jackson run as an “idea man” in an earlier century, and it was his style of backcountry hubris that McCain’s staffers had been hoping to revive. Shooting wolves from a small plane, bragging about her love of moose meat, “Sarah from Alaska” positioned herself as a regular Annie Oakley on the campaign trail.
It was not enough to rescue her from the mainstream (what she self-protectively called “lamestream”) media. Sarah Palin did not have a self-made woman’s résumé. She could not offset the “white trash” label as the Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton could. She had attended six unremarkable colleges. She had no military experience (à la navy veteran Jimmy Carter), though she did send one son off to Iraq. Writing in the New Yorker, Sam Tanenhaus was struck by Palin’s self-satisfied manner: “the certitude of being herself, in whatever unfinished condition, will always be good enough.”
Maureen Dowd quipped that Palin was a “country-music queen without the music.” She lacked the self-deprecating humor of Dolly Parton—not to mention the natural talent. The real conundrum was why, even more than how, she was chosen: the white trash Barbie was at once visually appealing and disruptive, and she came from a state whose motto on license plates read, “The Last Frontier.” The job was to package the roguish side of Palin alongside a comfortable, conventional female script. In the hit country single “Redneck Woman” (2004), Gretchen Wilson rejected Barbie as an unreal middle-class symbol—candidate Palin’s wardrobe bingeing was her Barbie moment.
Her Eliza Doolittle grand entrance came during the televised debate with Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. As the nation waited to see what she looked like and how she performed, Palin came onstage in a little black dress, wearing heels and pearls, and winked at the camera. From the neck down she looked like a Washington socialite, but the wink faintly suggested a gum-chewing waitress at a small-town diner. Embodying these two extremes, the fetching hockey mom image ultimately lost out to what McCain staffers identified as both “hillbilly” and “prima donna.”
Sex formed a meaningful subtext throughout Palin’s time of national exposure. In terms of trash talk, daughter Bristol Palin’s out‑of‑wedlock pregnancy was handled rather differently from Bill Clinton’s legendary philandering. Bloggers muddied the waters by spreading rumors about Sarah’s Down syndrome child, Trig: “Was he really Bristol’s?” they asked. A tale of baby swapping was meant to suggest a new twist on the backwoods immorality of inbred illegitimacy. Recall that it was Bill Clinton’s mother, Virginia, whose pedigree most troubled the critics. The legacy held: the rhetoric supporting eugenics (and the sterilization laws that followed) mainly targeted women as tainted breeders.
Sarah Palin’s Fargo-esque accent made her tortured speech patterns sound even worse. Former TV talk show host Dick Cavett wrote a scathing satirical piece in which he dubbed her a “serial syntax killer” whose high school English department deserved to be draped in black. He wanted to know how her swooning fans, who adored her for being a “mom like me,” or were impressed to see her shooting wolves, could explain how any of those traits would help her to govern.
We had been down this road before as citizens and voters. “Honest Abe” Lincoln was called an ape, a mudsill, and Kentucky white trash. Andrew Jackson was a rude, ill-tempered cracker. (And like Palin, his grammar was nothing to brag about.) The question loomed: At what point does commonness cease to be an asset, as a viable form of populism, and become a liability for a political actor? And should anyone be shocked when voters are swept up in an “almost Elvis-sized following,” as Cavett said Palin’s were? When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win.
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898 of 947 people found the following review helpful.
The Hidden Aspects of Race and Class in American History
By Herbert L Calhoun
This book explains the unsavory fine points of our national identity by probing and then exposing the not so well hidden loose ends that tie the bottom half of America's social hierarchy to the top half. It reveals that there is much much more to race and class than what we see at eye level. We learn here that the colonists who came to the Americas were very much a mixed bag.
Initially, the upper classes were investor friends of the British Crown, given concessions to search for gold and to find a non-existent water passage across North America to India. Later, they were made up of political and religious enemies of the beheaded King Charles I.
Jamestown was one of the many failures at finding gold or the non-existent passage to the East. And thus, only as an afterthought did the leaders decide to salvage their costly expeditions by killing two birds with one stone: England's horrendous social problems of crime, poverty and street violence would be solved by shipping the poor off to America and Australia. Then tracts of Indian lands would be sold off to entice the many lost souls hoping to make a life in the New World. These lost souls thus mostly were tricked onto ships in large numbers under a number of unsavory land contract schemes, the most prominent of which was called the "head-right system," in which those who did the tricking were paid in 50-acre land parcels, and in which the contractees thought they would all end up as rich English gentlemen, with free land, slaves and tools, living a life of leisure. Of course, it was all a lie, for most of them ended up as slaves. Most of the founding fathers became rich by acquiring large parcels of land through land scams of the head-right variation.
At the bottom of the heap were those of the poor and criminal classes, including children sold off by their parents, or shipped off for petty crimes, or just kidnapped off the streets. But they also included roguish highwaymen or pirates, vagrants, Irish rebels, whores, and convicts shipped to the colonies for a variety of crimes, such as refusing to be impressed into the army being in debt, etc. The progeny of these groups are today's poor white trash.
The majority of those brought to America's shores came as indentured servants, a British euphemism for "slaves." And even the few that did later manage to either escape slavery, or win their freedom outright after long periods of indentureship, seldom owned more than just token amounts of the least productive and most remote land. Most ended up as "squatters" forced into the outer rims of the Western territories to "squat" on Indian lands in violation of the Treaty of Paris.
The power of land, for most of American history, lay in being able to get married, "put down roots," breed a large family of field hands, and then work the land with as many hands as possible. "Squatters," despised by all sides, typically had none of these. Being the 17th through the 19th centuries' version of transients, they were young, virile, aimless and restless single white men, ineligible for marriage and forced to keep moving West in search of better and freer land. These unattached single men, wanderers and squatters, were the "free radicals" of the American heartland.
In 1676, a petite English Gentleman, Nathaniel Bacon, in what was called the Bacon Rebellion, along with a contingent of a few dozen single white men, plus an assortment of an equal number of red, white and black slaves, rebelled against being pushed to the outer edges of the colonies, left in hostile Indian territories to fend for themselves. They tried to burn down Virginia. It was the only time in American history when the lower classes have combined to rebel against the upper class.
With lop-sided gender demographics favoring single white men 10 to 1 (in the Caribbean, the male slave ratio alone was sometimes as much as 100-1), minimally marriageable women became a scarce resource. As the author notes, "women went to market with their virginity;" and marriage and fertility played a critical role in defining the shape of early American society. Any woman under 50, no matter how unattractive, could find a husband in the top tier of colonial American society. "Breeding capacity became a calculable natural resource -- commodified and exploited in the marriage exchange." For slave women, the womb became an article of commerce; and slave children, like cattle, were transactional property. In Virginia their "natural increase," literally would become a cottage industry, making it one of the world's leaders in the export of slaves.
James Cartwright has written a wonderfully important book, called "Violent Lands," on the meaning of these lopsided gender demographics in which large numbers of virile young white men were unable to find wives or become stakeholders in frontier American society. He claims this is why America became, and remains even today, one of the most "Violent Lands" in the world.
Thus, added to the staid and highly sensitive class hierarchy inherited from class conscious Britain, the reader can see why America became an incubator for deep race and class sensitivities, divisions and resentments. This "witches brew" of breeding, biology, race, backed up by Christian biblical text, seamlessly turned into an ideology of white supremacy, still the most enduring instrument on the palette used to shape the American social order.
Put more directly, America's founding generations saw good breeding and race as God's way of establishing white supremacy as nature's "taken for granted" class hierarchy; and ever since the days of the Puritans, American elite have frowned upon both race-mixing and upward mobility for the poorer classes. Both have been seen as threats, either to the menial labor force, which the plantation owning elite depended upon for their very existence; or, to the white supremacist social order, underwritten and mandated by the biblical story of ham, which simply meant that blacks would remain slaves at the bottom of the pecking order, in perpetuity.
Imported slaves and immigrants, either through indentureship, apprenticeships, debtors prisons, or due to indictment on criminal charges, prison-work release programs, etc., have all been forced into long-term arrangements for free, or nearly free, and always grossly unfair wages. These discrepancies between "fair" and "grossly unfair" wages have always rebounded back to land owners, or to big businesses' bottom line as obscene and unsavory profits.
Inequality, denial of the right to vote or to own land, all followed logically from assumptions of superior breeding and race superiority assumptions. Submission to those at the top of the societal hierarchy was regarded as a natural condition of humankind in early America. The Christian Bible was the final authority that reinforced these notions, pouring them into the mainstream. By teaching that some were born to rule, while others were born to submit and obey, breeding, and the biblical story of ham, had placed poor whites, as well as those with black skin, at the very bottom of the racial hierarchy.
Arkansas White Trash: A True Story
At the age of nine, I learned about this bottom-most tier of our society first hand a block from the Arkansas River where I grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Just below us -- both figuratively and literally -- down the sloping banks that slid right into the water, lived poisoned snakes, eels, gar and cat fish, turtles, bullfrogs, and an odd assortment of white people, who, though it was never said so openly, frightfully were the true wretched of the earth: These were Pine Bluff's "poor white trash:" authentic rednecks in the flesh.
The shanty town of jerry-rigged huts made of corrugated tin, cardboard and scrap wood, that they had fashioned as homes, had sprung up over night. It was a racially homogenous tribe of "bruised fruit" and "day old" bread peddling white folks. Daily, in push carts and horse drawn wagons, they sold to us, nearby blacks who lived just up the hill, food-stuffs that had been savaged from grocery store dump bins. These "petite entrepreneurs" were a curious and motley sort, having to defer to blacks -- if for no more reason than to encourage us, their only customers, to buy their "rank" produce.
But here's the catch: Whenever we bought it, they surely knew that we did so only out of pity for their dismal plight. Yet, curiously, other than interacting at their peddler's stations, and playing ball with two brothers around my age, who would occasionally come up the hill, we maintained a silent modus vivendi that served as an invisible shield between our two radically distinct subcultures. While most of my neighbors were working class blacks, sprinkled with a few college educated professionals, like my stepfather, Carl Redus, the white tribes that lived under the hill, were barely literate, and by anyone's social reckoning, had fallen well off the deep end of America's socio-economic grid.
...That is except for two things that I still vividly remember:
First, during the school year, a school bus headed down King Street, would disappear beneath the sloping hill stopping just short of sliding into the water to pick up a handful of shanty town redneck kids. It would then proceed clear across town past several black schools to the nearest white school to deposit them.
Second, and this came as quite a shock to a nine-year old black kid, almost without fail on the weekends, noisy redneck parties would ensue down under the hill. Rival redneck tribes living farther around the river bend, would come to party, and invariably before Sunday morning rolled around, a humongous fight would break out, and things would turn very violent and ugly indeed.
Somewhere in the wee hours of Saturday night, I would be awaken by ear-shattering noises, when literally all hell broke loose in shanty town. The sky would light up like Roman candles on the Fourth of July. Bullets would be flying every which way. Shanty town huts would go up in flames, and residents would be running up the hill and screaming as they fanned-out in every direction. It was like a mini race riot, but involving only one race, the white race.
And then, over the flaming carnage and the war-like din, one could hear puffing up the hill, a loud desperate banging on our neighbor Mr. Harris' backdoor. In a blood-curling southern drawl that is still unforgettable -- literally a life-and-death scream -- I could hear an older white man say: "Harris! Harris! Oooh lord Mr. Harris, please Harris, call the law! Call the law Harris! Please call the law!
As multiple sirens howled in the distance, headed in our direction, soon everything would go completely silent, as the paddy wagons, fire trucks, ambulances and stretchers would arrive. Through my bedroom blinds, I could see parties alien to us, bleeding profusely being carried away on stretchers or handcuffed, being hauled off to hospitals and jails. Altogether it was a sight to behold!
The only way we found out what happened in the dark down that hill, is the next day, Marshall and Leonard, the two brothers who occasionally played baseball with us, shamelessly would arrive at our backdoor, in search of food, clothing, bandages, medication, etc. And in exchange for a free breakfast, and a "care package," we would invite them in to give us the low-down on the fighting that had just taken place.
They never came to our front door and never had enough racial pride to turn down our breakfast invitation, or the "care package" containing black hand-me-down clothes and assorted goods that we invariably gave them. And thus, the brothers, bruised and scraped, seemed to find it cathartic to be able to unload the gory details of the "redneck wars" of the previous night.
What they told us was unsurprising. Invariably the wars were about personal slights, turf encroachments, being "dissed," and men from the wrong side of the river banks "hitting on" women from the right side. Add to this, the occasional hell-raising redneck males, armed and liquored-up, and generally on edge -- disgusted with not having a secure and respected place in society -- and the tableau of causes of the redneck wars is complete.
This book, "White Trash," is the first time I have ever seen in print the whole story of people like my river bank redneck friends, Marshall and Leonard, who I later learned both ended up in Reform School, which in Arkansas was the expressway for ending up on Cummings State prison farm.
The themes exposed here by this author, run true, and vector directly from the banks of the Arkansas River straight through American history like the jagged edges of the St. Andreas fault.
What this author has uncovered, is that, like race, class too is an unacknowledged independent variable that runs straight through American History, and is also America's most enduring fault line. One that when taken together with race, creates a reality coterminous with American culture itself.
How she was able to skillfully separate race from class, and then stich them back together again, when clearly they seem virtually inseparable, is part of the beauty of this fine treatment of both subjects.
In short, throughout American history, (including today's race to the bottom of the global labor pool), America's social pecking order has depended on maintaining in a steady-state, two racially separated poorer working classes at the very bottom rung of the social ladder. Since Bacon's rebellion of 1676, rationalizing these two groups as inferior, and pitting them against one another, has proven quite sufficient to keep the ideology of white supremacy in place, and the price of labor at rock bottom. Ten stars
564 of 613 people found the following review helpful.
Good.
By College Stealth
I was super excited about the release of this book; I've been a fan of the PBS "People Like Us" movie for a very long time. A lot of the narrative in the U.S. tends to focus on race, overlooking elements of class that exist and have some pretty strong historical roots.
This is a good read, it's a great read if you're someone who is faintly familiar with ideas in sociology or in general about class struggle. It's a sociology/history book, so may not be as mainstream as people would like. What's nice is that this particular author actually articulates the ideas some have come across in sociology/history regarding class and puts those often underlying murmurs of class struggle into historical context, along with supporting ideas and accounts. It ties in some of the ideas of the Founding Fathers, especially as it pertains to Thomas Paine and variations and distinctions between the land-holding and non, as property is often tied to wealth. The author starts out in discussing the elements of Protestant Work Ethic and the reverberations of that in the U.S.
The author does a great job of going through the different evolutions of the idea of "white trash" especially as it pertains to the name and variations of the name. There is also the element of how the imagery of white trash changes over the years; such as mountain folk or those in Kentucky, or those who grow corn. It's relatively an always evolving term as explained by the author. The author takes the reader through the present day, and links it back to the civil war and to the revolutionary war.
All and all, a great book and a quick read that I enjoyed. This is a history narrative, meaning I don't really know where some of the reviews dog it for being "political." It takes the reader through the evolution of the term white trash, it looks at variations of white trash and how it is portrayed, how it comes to be viewed in the U.S., it's a term that has had some unique applications and has been crossed applied to various groups throughout the U.S.'s history. The citations are well done, lots of primary sources and clear links to where the author is drawing conclusions from. The author also focuses on the term in both the north and south, albeit after the Civil War it becomes more concentrated within the southern region. The author also stays pretty focused on her niche, which makes it a compact and enjoyable read.
346 of 378 people found the following review helpful.
A Country Obsessed with Scapegoating the Lower Classes
By M. JEFFREY MCMAHON
This is a compelling, comprehensive history of America from the Colonial Period in Jamestown to today's media world seen brilliantly through the lens of social class. In the process of seeing how class conflicts with America's innocent dream of democracy and equality, Isenberg shows convincingly that much of what America treasures as a refuge where all people are on equal footing is a fantastical myth with no bearing on reality. Looking at class stereotypes handed down from the British who saw America as a wasteland, a rubbish field in which to discard their undesirables, America has always hated the poor and justified their hatred by seeing them as genetically hard-wired to be sloths.
We see this ugly type of classism in the works of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and it extends into the eugenics craze of the 1920s, the Depression, and our current scoffing of such media figures as Honey Boo Boo.
In this "untold history of class in America," we see why the story is untold: Because our contempt for the poor conflicts with our childish delusion that we are a country that believes in the equality of all people. Isenberg makes a convincing case that we have never valued equality and have always had a convenient scapegoat for our country's injustices. Highly Recommended.
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