A Look at America’s Long and Troubled History of White Poverty
Erosion scars on an Alabama tenant farm, 1937.Credit...Arthur Rothstein/Library of Congress/Corbis — VCG via Getty ImagesBUY BOOK ▾
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By Thomas J. Sugrue
June 24, 2016
WHITE TRASH
The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
By Nancy Isenberg
Illustrated. 460 pp. Viking. $28.
No line about class in the United States is more famous than the one written by the German sociologist Werner Sombart in 1906. Class consciousness in America, he contended, foundered “on the shoals of roast beef and apple pie.” Sombart was among the first scholars to ask the question, “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” His answer, now solidified into conventional wisdom about American exceptionalism, was simple: “America is a freer and more egalitarian society than Europe.” In the United States, he argued, “there is not the stigma of being the class apart that almost all European workers have about them. . . . The bowing and scraping before the ‘upper classes,’ which produces such an unpleasant impression in Europe, is completely unknown.”
In “White Trash,” Nancy Isenberg joins a long list of historians over the last century who have sent Sombart’s theory crashing on the shoals of history. The prolific Charles and Mary Beard, progressive historians in the first third of the 20th century, reinterpreted American history as a struggle for economic power between the haves and have-nots. W.E.B. Du Bois interpreted Reconstruction as a great class rebellion, as freed slaves fought to control their own working conditions and wages. Labor and political historians in the 1970s and 1980s recovered a forgotten history of blue-collar consciousness and grass-roots radicalism, from the Workingmen’s Party in Andrew Jackson’s America to the late-19th-century populists of upcountry Georgia to the Depression-era leftist unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Historians of public policy, like the influential Michael B. Katz, emphasized the persistence of notions of “the undeserving poor,” an ideology that blamed economic deprivation on the alleged pathological behavior of poor people themselves and eroded support for welfare programs.
So Isenberg’s story is not, as her subtitle suggests, “untold.” But she retells it with unusual ambition and (to use a class-laden term) in a masterly manner. Ranging from John Rolfe and Pocahontas to “The Beverly Hillbillies,” Isenberg — a historian at Louisiana State University whose previous books include a biography of Aaron Burr — provides a cultural history of changing concepts of class and inferiority. She argues that British colonizers saw their North American empire as a place to dump their human waste: the idle, indigent and criminal. Richard Hakluyt the younger, one of the many colorful characters who fill these pages, saw the continent as “one giant workhouse,” in Isenberg’s phrase, where the feckless poor could be turned into industrious drudges.
That process of shunting outsiders to the nation’s margins, she argues, continued in the early Republic and in the 19th century, when landless white settlers began to fill in the backcountry of Appalachia and the swamps of the lowland South, living in lowly cabins, dreaming of landownership but mostly toiling as exploited tenant farmers or itinerant laborers.
In the book’s most ingenious passages, Isenberg offers a catalog of the insulting terms well-off Americans used to denigrate their economic inferiors. In 17th-century Virginia, critics of rebellious indentured servants denounced them as society’s “offscourings,” a term for fecal matter. A hundred years later, elites railed against the “useless lubbers” of “Poor Carolina,” a place she calls the “first white trash colony.” In the early 19th century, landowners described the landless rural poor as boisterous, foolish “crackers” and idle, vagabond “squatters.”
Not all stereotypes of the white poor were negative. In the Jacksonian period, populists celebrated Davy Crockett and his coonskin cap. Lincoln might be derided as a poor woodsman, but he was also valorized for his log cabin roots. During the Great Depression, New Deal photographers and writers depicted farmers displaced by the Dust Bowl as virtuous people, victims of economic forces beyond their control.
By the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th, Isenberg shows, crude caricatures gave way to seemingly scientific explanations of lower-class status. “Class was congenital,” she writes, summarizing a mid-19th-century view of poor whites. One writer highlighted the “runtish forefathers” and “consumptive parents” who birthed a “notorious race” of inferior white people. Essayists described human differences by borrowing terminology from specialists in animal husbandry. Just as dogs could be distinguished by their breeds and horses distinguished from mules, so could people be characterized as superior or inferior based on their physical traits.
By the late 19th century, some writers used family genealogies to trace the roots of criminality, illness and insanity, and warn of the dangers of “degeneration.” By the early 20th century, armed with increasingly sophisticated statistical tools and new understandings of genetics, eugenicists offered the most chilling of responses to poor whites: They argued that the state should use its power to keep them from reproducing. Those arguments shaped one of the Supreme Court’s most notorious decisions, Buck v. Bell (1927), in which the court, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes writing for the majority, upheld a Virginia sterilization program to prevent “generations of imbeciles” from proliferating and thus to keep the nation from being “swamped with incompetence.”
The story of eugenics offers an example of the ways that, throughout the American past, questions of class status have been entangled with notions of racial inferiority. Isenberg makes a strong case that one of the most common ways of stigmatizing poor people was to question their racial identity. Backcountry vagabonds were often compared unfavorably with the “savage,” nomadic Indian. Sun-browned tenant farmers faced derision for their less-than-white appearance. After the emancipation of slaves, politicians warned of the rise of a “mongrel” nation, fearful that white bloodlines would be contaminated by blacks, a process that might expand the ranks of “trash” people.
But Isenberg falls prey to one of the most common and pernicious fallacies in American popular discourse about class: For her, America’s landless farmers and precarious workers are by default white. “Class,” she writes, “had its own singular and powerful dynamic, apart from its intersection with race.” Thus we get a history of class in America that discusses white tenant farmers at length, but scarcely mentions black sharecroppers or Mexican farmworkers, as if somehow their race segregated them from America’s history of class subjugation. Native Americans make cameo appearances playing their role as a degraded race or as the noble savage — as ideal types rather than as exploited and impoverished peoples themselves. The “coolie” Asian workers imported to the post-Civil War South, the Filipino agricultural laborers of California’s Central Valley and the inhabitants of San Francisco’s and New York’s 19th-century Chinatowns, all workers, most at the bottom of the economic ladder, are virtually absent from these pages, even though they were subject to caricatures stunningly similar to those hurled at backcountry “squatters” and “hillbillies.”
It is a commonplace argument in American politics that somehow race and class stand apart. Pundits charge that racial minorities practice a self-segregating “identity politics” rather than uniting around shared economic grievances. But a history of class in America that assumes its whiteness and relegates the nonwhite poor to the backstage is one that misses the fundamental reality of economic inequality in American history, that race and class were — and are — fundamentally entwined.
A correction was made on
July 10, 2016:
Because of an editing error, a review on June 26 about “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America,” by Nancy Isenberg, referred incorrectly to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote the majority opinion in Buck v. Bell, a 1927 forced-sterilization case. Though Holmes was the court’s acting chief justice for a brief period in 1930, he was never chief justice.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more
Thomas J. Sugrue is a professor of social and cultural analysis and history at New York University.
A version of this article appears in print o
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