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Summary and Analysis of White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
Based on the Book by Nancy Isenberg
By Worth Books OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4487-5
CHAPTER 1
Summary
Preface
In America, there is a class of white people for whom social mobility and equality are a vanishing prospect: white trash (Also known as waste people, rednecks, and a slew of other colorful terms). History and culture have mainly been silent on this derided class, and insulting depictions of them — such as the clownish rubes of The Beverly Hillbillies or the despicable Ewells of To Kill a Mockingbird — pass without comment. In White Trash, Isenberg brings rural white Americans into focus, tracing their history and examining how their poverty evolved into an inescapable — and reviled — identity.
Need to Know: Poor white people in America have historically been used as pawns to do the upper classes' dirty work without being fairly compensated. Their resulting poverty is blamed on their lack of initiative and genetic inferiority.
Introduction: Fables We Forget By
In America, we tell ourselves we have no class distinctions because, under our constitution, all men are created equal. But for a comfortable middle class to exist, another class must reside below it. Since our country's inception, we have nourished a white underclass deemed unworthy of notice or aid. Since the 1600s, poor whites have been held responsible for their station, faulted for criminality, disease, boisterousness, and idleness. Always a crucial part of our country's economy, poor whites are also permanent cultural tropes: even now, depictions proliferate in our books, films, and TV shows. In recent decades, "rednecks" have responded by embracing the designation and its traits. Elites have blamed everything from genetics to obstinacy to inherent laziness, but there is a far more complex history as to why "poor white trash" exists and has been forced to remain as such.
Need to Know: The stratification of class in America did not begin with the American Revolution, nor was it reset at that time. Its roots are in the British class system that was carried overseas and ingrained in our culture in ways that can be traced up through today.
Part I: To Begin the World Anew
Chapter One
Taking Out the Trash: Waste People in the New World
When the British decided to send settlers to America, they didn't see it as a land of opportunity — at least, not for those who would live there. Instead, monarchs and politicians saw it as a chance to rid England of its ever-growing population of peasants, vagrants, and criminals. They could send their waste to the New World, where, in the worst case, these people would die from hardship or disease, and, in the best case, they would provide labor that would eventually turn a profit. In fact, clergyman Richard Hakluyt sought funding from Queen Elizabeth I with his "Discourse on Western Planting," a propaganda piece that extolled the merits of sending a potential workforce to cultivate the untapped resources of the Americas. (Because the Native American population had not cultivated their lands, the agrarian colonizing British viewed the land as theirs for the taking. They also viewed the Native Americans as an untapped labor force.)
Thus the dregs of England were sent across the Atlantic, mostly as indentured servants who were only a step above slaves. Their masters were mostly Puritans, who lived a strict, hierarchical lifestyle and enforced a military-like environment. Delinquent men, loose women, and orphaned children died en masse from disease and starvation; those who didn't were put to work on tobacco plantations. Tobacco had proved a hardy and lucrative crop — which thereby increased the need for more cheap labor, and made wealthy landowners wealthier.
Need to Know: As individuals, the impoverished and criminal sent to America were worthless to the British; as a workforce, they were invaluable. They would colonize and cultivate the rich lands for the prospectors and investors of Europe. The plantation owners also benefitted: they received more land for each indentured servant they sponsored than each servant would receive upon completion of their service.
Chapter Two
John Locke's Lubberland: The Settlements of Carolina and Georgia
Philosopher John Locke never set foot in the Americas, but his writings profoundly influenced the evolution of classes in the colonies. His Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, adopted in 1669, urged an almost feudal hierarchy that reserved most land ownership for the wealthy. It suggested poor whites be Leet-men, or productive peasants, a class that ranked just above slaves. Locke, the third-largest shareholder in the Royal African Company, unsurprisingly asserted that slaves be wholly under their masters' control.
Locke's ideas failed to come to fruition, and, by 1712, the colony of Carolina split into North and South. The southern region was ruled by elite planters and merchants outnumbered by their slave population. They despised their northern neighbors, "lazy lubbers" in "Poor Carolina," a vagrant, uncivilized class who provided neither wealth nor a class of useful laborers to form a class cushion between elites and slaves. Nearby Virginia shared this view of their southern neighbor: William Byrd II wrote travelogues about the rebellious colony and the "Great Dismal Swamp" that separated them, proposing to drain it for farmland — an idea enthusiastically shared by George Washington.
James Oglethorpe, a former member of the British military, became the de facto leader of the new state of Georgia, another experiment. This new state banned slavery and welcomed poorer freemen, granting them each 50 acres of land. Immigrants from Scotland and Germany — farmers prepared for hardship — succeeded, but English residents of the colony, who were more likely to have held jobs entirely unrelated to farming, did not thrive. Eventually Georgia, at the behest of large landowners, also became a slave state. The southern experiment to create a society of "Leet-men" had failed.
Need to Know: Absent a monarch, class and hereditary privilege expressed themselves through land ownership in the new nation. Efforts to create a middle class and to prevent the rise of a society made up of few large landowners using slaves for labor failed utterly.
Chapter Three
Benjamin Franklin's American Breed: The Demographics of Mediocrity
Benjamin Franklin was engrossed by the study of idleness, especially from a scientific standpoint. Like Oglethorpe, he blamed slavery for the plague of laziness among poor whites. In fact, poor men of European descent, seeking to maintain their status a step above the slaves, refused to do the same work, even for pay. Franklin proposed that westward expansion, and movement in general, was the logical solution. If people were spread out across more land, they would more easily forget their place above or below others and achieve a "happy mediocrity" that allowed them to work toward sufficiency while still purchasing British goods. He did not encourage social mobility; rather, he thought that by spreading people out, class conflict could simply be reduced.
Political thinker Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense became popular fodder for the American revolutionaries, though Paine himself had barely been in the colonies a year when he wrote it. He was against a self-serving monarchy, one that drained the nation of its wealth to support wars abroad. Independence would breed self-sufficiency, commerce and free trade, their means. Independence, he hoped, would eventually eliminate idleness, though not necessarily eliminate class.
Need to Know: Benjamin Franklin believed himself a self-made man and disparaged the indentured and apprenticed — though he had run away from being an apprentice. He also failed to acknowledge how his license to print money gave him access to the wealthy and powerful, which in turn allowed him to gain power. Thomas Paine wanted the new country to stop allowing the monarchy to drain its coffers, but his discussion of class focused only on that task. Both men failed to see that dismantling the class system would require concentrated effort from the top, not just the individual merit of worthier men.
Chapter Four
Thomas Jefferson's Rubbish: A Curious Topography of Class
Revolutionary politicians and elites took it for granted that poor whites would fight their wars for them. In 1775, having been conscripted as soldiers in past wars with little benefit to themselves, the poor were resistant to joining in the fight against the British, as they asserted they had nothing to protect. Though Virginia promised a bounty of one slave upon a soldier's completion of his service, the colony still struggled to find men to fight. Prospective soldiers were right to assume that the fight for "independence" would result in the same for them: They returned from war to inflated taxes, and often lost the little land they had because they could no longer afford them. In Shays' Rebellion of 1786, a former soldier gathered an army to protest courts auctioning off such farms and houses.
A kind view of history remembers Jefferson as an agrarian democrat, but the politician who at one time owned 187 slaves never tilled his own soil. Jefferson's connection to the land was more theoretical: He wrote about the ecological beauty of the United States in his Notes on the State of Virginia, and upheld the "cultivator" as a most honorable man. (Cultivators, in his mind, were not tenants or slaves, of course, but landowners.) Jefferson thought class divisions were the result of poor breeding, and that working the land — particularly that of the Louisiana Purchase, a negotiation that doubled the size of the United States — could help breed better people. (His own farm never turned a profit.) Jefferson himself was intrigued by the theory that blackness could be "bred" out of slaves through successive generations. He failed to act on this, however: he had four children by his quadroon slave, Sally Hemings, two of whom ran away to live as freemen, and the other two he did not free until his death.
Need to Know: Jefferson's approach to class was one that celebrated a theoretical middle, though the state of Virginia was largely farmed by the wealthy, who owned large tracts of lands and hundreds of slaves. His own attempts to farm, despite his obvious advantages, were unsuccessful. Like his contemporaries, he was obsessed with the connection of labor to character and breeding, and linked cultivating the land as the way to breed a superior citizen.
Chapter Five
Andrew Jackson's Cracker Country: The Squatter as Common Man
The Americans who headed west were not, for the most part, regarded in a good light. Writers and novelists portrayed the new inhabitants of "cracker" country as half-civilized non–city dwellers who had the potential to become friendly woodsmen or unpredictable, aggressive squatters. They were seen as vagrants who appropriated land owned by others, and their folksy appeal was diminished by their slovenliness and brutality. Those who claimed land others had cleared and cultivated were chased off of it. More often, they were seen as "expendable," and so were routinely asked to attack and clear the Indians. In short, the US government wanted the land settled and civilized, but struggled with how to control and profit from the settlers.
The 1820s saw the election of two militiamen, with whom squatters identified, to the Senate and the presidency. David Crockett and Andrew Jackson, who themselves had a contentious relationship, both advocated for squatters and had a folksy appeal to rural voters, whose rights they championed. (Both were also slave owners.) Crockett made a virtue of his ignorance, while Jackson made a virtue of his violence. Both placed themselves on a level with the squatter and in opposition to the effete wealthy. Jackson, however, was a brute who massacred the Seminoles of Florida against government orders, while Crockett's reflexive dislike of partisan politics, as well as his own background as a squatter, may have made him a hearty defender of their rights.
Need to Know: The 1800s saw the development of a shared understanding of the character of squatters and crackers, and their emergence into the public eye. With the help of politicians like Crockett and Jackson, squatters did not achieve equality, but they did achieve recognition: politicians pandered to them by making a virtue of ignorance and violence, a trend still evident today.
Part II: Degeneration of the American Breed
Chapter Six
Pedigree and Poor White Trash: Bad Blood, Half-Breeds, and Clay-Eaters
During the 1850s, the terms "white trash" and "clay-eaters" gained currency as the country became consumed with class in terms of pedigree, or good blood. Physically, poor rural whites seemed as distinct as a race of aliens, with sickly broods of children, defects, and inferior physiognomies. As the Civil War approached, they also came to be associated with the southern states — yet again, slavery and white idleness were inextricably linked. As the frontier expanded, the new Free Soil party, which became the Republican Party, pushed for slavery to be outlawed — not to make slaves freemen, but to leave the frontier free of the taint of the "poor white trash." Slavery advocates, however, asserted that bloodlines were the cause of poor whites' idleness.
Texas under the Mexican government had sanctioned race-mixing, and even encouraged white settlers to marry local Tejano women. For Texans, class existed under a strict racial caste system, but one that included mixed races in the hierarchy. The US government wished to obliterate Native Americans, blacks, and Mexicans entirely, to keep them from creating a "polluted" lineage. When Texas became part of the United States, the government denied citizenship to anyone with African or Native American descent in order to preserve a white majority. In California, a motley cast of émigrés drawn by the Gold Rush raised similar fears. America had become obsessed with racial purity.
Need to Know: In the northern Free Soilers' rhetoric, squatters were honorable workers who had been wrongfully deprived of land due to the proliferation of slaves and landowners breeding livestock. In the proslavery South, genetics was considered destiny. In their own view, poor whites were "farmers without farms." Either way, it was certain that not all whites were equal.
Chapter Seven
Cowards, Poltroons, and Mudsills: Civil War as Class Warfare
The Civil War began in 1861 after Jefferson Davis was inaugurated president of the Confederacy. Fixed class identity became a marker of stability for southern politicians who wanted to convince poor constituents that keeping slavery intact was in their best interests — without slaves, who but they would be the lowest classes? But poor southern whites weren't convinced, especially when most were conscripted to army service while more educated men and slaveholders were not. Hundreds of thousands of them either fought for the Union or deserted the Confederate Army.
The Confederacy's other tactic was to demonize the North and popularize an image of them as degenerates or "mudsills." Lincoln, their mudsill president, wore the designation as a badge of honor and used his association with workers and commoners to rally poor men. While the poor were suffering food shortages and revolting against the rich whites who hoarded food in the South, the rich were, in fact, asked to pay reparations in border states like Mississippi because the Union politicians thought that the strife of war should be felt by all its people.
Need to Know: The Civil War was directed by the powerful but fought by the poor, whether they were the white trash of the South or the mudsills of the North. Accounts from members of the victorious Union Army, however, describe surprise at seeing the true, degraded state of the southern poor.
Chapter Eight
Thoroughbreds and Scalawags: Bloodlines and Bastard Stock in the Age of Eugenics
During the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, a conflict of interest developed between poor whites and African Americans: Whites thought they should retain their racial superiority, while freed slaves sought to prove that cognitive ability and workmanship superseded race. By 1866, Republican critics noted that the freed slaves made good use of federal assistance, while whites appeared to be lazily living off handouts. Democrats, hoping to preserve whiteness above all else, started passing miscegenation laws to prohibit interracial breeding and marriage. Across the country, people started embracing eugenics, or selective breeding, as a means of avoiding the "disease" of poor whiteness.
The eugenics craze began at the turn of the 20th century, and was endorsed by President Teddy Roosevelt. Charles Davenport established the Eugenics Records Office in 1904, and from there, the movement expanded. Educated women were endowed with a duty to procreate selectively but abundantly to produce strong, Anglo-Saxon children, and tax exemptions were increased to encourage them. On the negative side, asylums were expanded to hold poor white women, and by 1927, the Supreme Court decided in Buck v. Bell that states had the right to impose sterilization laws targeting criminals, diseased, and degenerate classes. By 1931, there were 27 states with sterilization laws.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Summary and Analysis of White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Worth Books. Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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