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White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America Paperback – Illustrated, 1 January 1900
by Nancy Isenberg (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 5,131 ratings
The New York Times Bestseller, 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, co-author of The Problem of Democracy, 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.
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.
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Lemursss
5.0 out of 5 stars Every aspiring American should read thisReviewed in Australia on 24 December 2018
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If Hiliary Clinton had read this book, she would never have made the comment "the deplorables" and effectively lost the election. The book is a real eye-opener to the hidden America. Twenty-five years ago I travelled through the poorest county in Appalachia. It didn't look too bad until my colleague explained the situation. All the trailers were hidden from site behind barns. Twenty-five percent of the population were distitute. The children came to school unwashed, unread and unfed. This was a whole hidden segment of America. Did they vote for Donald Trump? No, they didn't have to, because the next layer of the social order marginally above them did.
Susan L. Hanley
5.0 out of 5 stars ConfrontingReviewed in Australia on 7 August 2018
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This is a thorough and methodical account of disadvantage through every stage in the history of the US.
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Paolo
5.0 out of 5 stars well researched and writtenReviewed in Germany on 1 July 2024
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For those interested ina America history and socio-economic dynamics an interesting read
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docread
5.0 out of 5 stars A class ridden society transplanted to the New WorldReviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 April 2021
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An outstanding historical narrative chronicling the trials and tribulations of the marginalised poor whites in the US. It debunks cherished egalitarian myths of equal opportunities and levelling up, and reveals the long standing contempt and scornful attitudes, expressed by the political and intellectual elites towards the white underclass.The book traces the origins of these attitudes in Elizabethan England that faced the problems of a rapidly growing indigent idle population, drifting into the towns begging, thieving and threatening the stability of a stratified order. The primary impetus for the colonisation of North America was to rid the old country of the rabble, by shipping a vast number of poor who were forced to labour in newly established plantation colonies for the profit of the mercantile aristocracy, as had happened in Ireland. It was hoped in the process to acquire a share of the tantalising wealth of the New World exploited by the Spaniards, and undermine the hated Spanish Empire by impeding its Northern penetration into the new Continent.
Although the founders’ motives of the different colonies were at some variance about land distribution for the lower classes, most of the original settlements struggled to thrive or survive in the new challenging environment because of a lack of skilled manpower. This was compounded by the demotivation of indentured labour, a system that duplicated an archaic feudal society. To compensate for the unreliability of an intractable idle labour force, as in Spanish colonies, African slavery was introduced . In its early days white servants worked side by side with black slaves and there was more fluidity in social intercourse as they fraternised and and often cooperated in resisting their masters by running away together. Legislation was implemented in order to create fixed boundaries between the poor landless whites and the black slaves, thus sowing the seeds of Racism that has tainted the fabric of American society ever since. The author emphasised that “Land was the principle source of wealth and the true measure of liberty and civic worth” Land grants and land titles created a privileged class of slave holders particularly in the tobacco and cotton growing colonies of the South. The poor whites were either destitute squatters struggling with disease and malnutrition or poor tenants eking meagre livelihood on marginal unproductive land. They were frequently disenfranchised or their voting rights severely curtailed by property qualifications. The gap continued to widen with every generation with no guarantee of social mobility. Slavery hindered economic progress for the landless white by encouraging idleness, scavenging and begging. This situation remained one of the main drivers of American history leading to the Civil War , but also to the recurrent immigration waves opening up the continent interior to the poor landless masses. It led later to the New Deal following the Great Depression, the first serious attempt to combat mass poverty and redress the wide inequalities in American society by creating greater employment opportunities and a basic welfare system. This was followed in the 1960’s by LBJohnson’s welfare programmes.
An obsession with racial health and pedigree was translated into pseudoscientific eugenic preoccupations about the physical and mental degeneration, well into the second half of the 20th Century. After centuries of propagating an ideology that demonises poverty as a consequence of idleness rather than a lack of favourable circumstances, the State still remains lukewarm at addressing the wider causes of class inequalities in education, health and housing. And to this day punitive judicial and policing systems have aimed principally at controlling the poor and protecting the property owners, while the sham democratic process mobilises their votes with promises of curbing immigration or deflecting their anger unto remote Big Government.
The author documents a detailed social, political and intellectual history to support her thesis. She takes us on an extraordinary journey opening up unexplored vistas in order to undermine the enduring myth of a classless American society. A highly recommended engrossing read.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Untold history of Class in AmericaReviewed in France on 6 May 2021
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Livre très intéressant pour qui s'intéresse à l'histoire américaine.
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Manuel Ramirez Reyes
5.0 out of 5 stars Poverty in USReviewed in Mexico on 21 November 2018
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Ir you want to understand the genesis of poverty in US, this boom is a must. Do not miss the oportunity to comprenhend about this definitory subject nowadays.
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Nathália Porto
4.0 out of 5 stars GreatReviewed in Brazil on 29 April 2018
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Great book, With a remarkable historical and media research. I recommend for everyone interested in race and class issues in America.
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From Australia
Reviewed in Australia on 24 December 2018
If Hiliary Clinton had read this book, she would never have made the comment "the deplorables" and effectively lost the election. The book is a real eye-opener to the hidden America. Twenty-five years ago I travelled through the poorest county in Appalachia. It didn't look too bad until my colleague explained the situation. All the trailers were hidden from site behind barns. Twenty-five percent of the population were distitute. The children came to school unwashed, unread and unfed. This was a whole hidden segment of America. Did they vote for Donald Trump? No, they didn't have to, because the next layer of the social order marginally above them did.
Reviewed in Australia on 7 August 2018
This is a thorough and methodical account of disadvantage through every stage in the history of the US.
From other countries
Client d'Amazon
Untold history of Class in America
Reviewed in France on 6 May 2021Livre très intéressant pour qui s'intéresse à l'histoire américaine.
docread
A class ridden society transplanted to the New World
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 April 2021An outstanding historical narrative chronicling the trials and tribulations of the marginalised poor whites in the US. It debunks cherished egalitarian myths of equal opportunities and levelling up, and reveals the long standing contempt and scornful attitudes, expressed by the political and intellectual elites towards the white underclass.The book traces the origins of these attitudes in Elizabethan England that faced the problems of a rapidly growing indigent idle population, drifting into the towns begging, thieving and threatening the stability of a stratified order. The primary impetus for the colonisation of North America was to rid the old country of the rabble, by shipping a vast number of poor who were forced to labour in newly established plantation colonies for the profit of the mercantile aristocracy, as had happened in Ireland. It was hoped in the process to acquire a share of the tantalising wealth of the New World exploited by the Spaniards, and undermine the hated Spanish Empire by impeding its Northern penetration into the new Continent.
Although the founders’ motives of the different colonies were at some variance about land distribution for the lower classes, most of the original settlements struggled to thrive or survive in the new challenging environment because of a lack of skilled manpower. This was compounded by the demotivation of indentured labour, a system that duplicated an archaic feudal society. To compensate for the unreliability of an intractable idle labour force, as in Spanish colonies, African slavery was introduced . In its early days white servants worked side by side with black slaves and there was more fluidity in social intercourse as they fraternised and and often cooperated in resisting their masters by running away together. Legislation was implemented in order to create fixed boundaries between the poor landless whites and the black slaves, thus sowing the seeds of Racism that has tainted the fabric of American society ever since. The author emphasised that “Land was the principle source of wealth and the true measure of liberty and civic worth” Land grants and land titles created a privileged class of slave holders particularly in the tobacco and cotton growing colonies of the South. The poor whites were either destitute squatters struggling with disease and malnutrition or poor tenants eking meagre livelihood on marginal unproductive land. They were frequently disenfranchised or their voting rights severely curtailed by property qualifications. The gap continued to widen with every generation with no guarantee of social mobility. Slavery hindered economic progress for the landless white by encouraging idleness, scavenging and begging. This situation remained one of the main drivers of American history leading to the Civil War , but also to the recurrent immigration waves opening up the continent interior to the poor landless masses. It led later to the New Deal following the Great Depression, the first serious attempt to combat mass poverty and redress the wide inequalities in American society by creating greater employment opportunities and a basic welfare system. This was followed in the 1960’s by LBJohnson’s welfare programmes.
An obsession with racial health and pedigree was translated into pseudoscientific eugenic preoccupations about the physical and mental degeneration, well into the second half of the 20th Century. After centuries of propagating an ideology that demonises poverty as a consequence of idleness rather than a lack of favourable circumstances, the State still remains lukewarm at addressing the wider causes of class inequalities in education, health and housing. And to this day punitive judicial and policing systems have aimed principally at controlling the poor and protecting the property owners, while the sham democratic process mobilises their votes with promises of curbing immigration or deflecting their anger unto remote Big Government.
The author documents a detailed social, political and intellectual history to support her thesis. She takes us on an extraordinary journey opening up unexplored vistas in order to undermine the enduring myth of a classless American society. A highly recommended engrossing read.
Although the founders’ motives of the different colonies were at some variance about land distribution for the lower classes, most of the original settlements struggled to thrive or survive in the new challenging environment because of a lack of skilled manpower. This was compounded by the demotivation of indentured labour, a system that duplicated an archaic feudal society. To compensate for the unreliability of an intractable idle labour force, as in Spanish colonies, African slavery was introduced . In its early days white servants worked side by side with black slaves and there was more fluidity in social intercourse as they fraternised and and often cooperated in resisting their masters by running away together. Legislation was implemented in order to create fixed boundaries between the poor landless whites and the black slaves, thus sowing the seeds of Racism that has tainted the fabric of American society ever since. The author emphasised that “Land was the principle source of wealth and the true measure of liberty and civic worth” Land grants and land titles created a privileged class of slave holders particularly in the tobacco and cotton growing colonies of the South. The poor whites were either destitute squatters struggling with disease and malnutrition or poor tenants eking meagre livelihood on marginal unproductive land. They were frequently disenfranchised or their voting rights severely curtailed by property qualifications. The gap continued to widen with every generation with no guarantee of social mobility. Slavery hindered economic progress for the landless white by encouraging idleness, scavenging and begging. This situation remained one of the main drivers of American history leading to the Civil War , but also to the recurrent immigration waves opening up the continent interior to the poor landless masses. It led later to the New Deal following the Great Depression, the first serious attempt to combat mass poverty and redress the wide inequalities in American society by creating greater employment opportunities and a basic welfare system. This was followed in the 1960’s by LBJohnson’s welfare programmes.
An obsession with racial health and pedigree was translated into pseudoscientific eugenic preoccupations about the physical and mental degeneration, well into the second half of the 20th Century. After centuries of propagating an ideology that demonises poverty as a consequence of idleness rather than a lack of favourable circumstances, the State still remains lukewarm at addressing the wider causes of class inequalities in education, health and housing. And to this day punitive judicial and policing systems have aimed principally at controlling the poor and protecting the property owners, while the sham democratic process mobilises their votes with promises of curbing immigration or deflecting their anger unto remote Big Government.
The author documents a detailed social, political and intellectual history to support her thesis. She takes us on an extraordinary journey opening up unexplored vistas in order to undermine the enduring myth of a classless American society. A highly recommended engrossing read.
2 people found this helpful
Amazon Customer
An eye-opener into class divisions among white Americans
Reviewed in Canada on 20 September 2017Very well researched book. Enlightening as to the long history of certain segments of American society being consider "less than" their fellow citizens. Something which reaches back to the time the colonies were first established in North America. I was particularly interested in the chapters dealing with the Civil War. So many blame Northern educated "elitists" for the prejudice and judgement of poor whites in the South. In reality, the plantation owners were just as bad or worse in terms of how they disrespected white labourers in their states. Very good book and gave a good glimpse into how someone like Donald Trump was able to manipulate the emotions of a class of people who feel they have not been taken seriously, and have been duped into blaming immigrants, Blacks and the educated as being the source of all their problems rather than look at the real cuprits.
4 people found this helpful
Nothankyou
White Trash
Reviewed in Spain on 7 August 2016Un trabajo cuidadosamente investigado y escrito. Interesante y útil. Hay repeticiones en el texto, y cuestiones muy conocidas tomadas "literalmente". Buen libro.
Manuel Ramirez Reyes
Poverty in US
Reviewed in Mexico on 21 November 2018Ir you want to understand the genesis of poverty in US, this boom is a must. Do not miss the oportunity to comprenhend about this definitory subject nowadays.
Paolo
well researched and written
Reviewed in Germany on 1 July 2024For those interested ina America history and socio-economic dynamics an interesting read
L. E. Roberts
HATED IT, BUT THANKS, NANCY, FOR WRITING IT. YOU ROCK!
Reviewed in the United States on 21 April 2017I gave this book five stars, which according to the website means, "I love it." I did not love it. In fact, I disliked the book in many ways. At the same time, I could not put it down. As a career military person, I had always regarded myself as mostly conservative (even while attending UC Berkeley in the 1970's). I retired from the military around the turn of the century (or millennium, whichever you prefer), and, at around 45 years old, started attempting to live an "examined life." I stopped regarding myself as a "non-partizan conservative," and felt that I was more of a "traditional semi-progressive." If that sounds stupid and naive, that is because I was stupid and naive. I was a middle-aged white man who thought that racism was behind us (except for some tiny lunatic fringe in some "Dogpatch" ultra-rural area). I also believed, buckle and thong, in our judicial system, and truly believed that a black man could get as fair a trial as a white man throughout the United States.
In the last two years of turmoil, I started reading more news online than just the BBC. I discovered Slate and The Economist, and my world view started changing. I ran across a review of this book on Slate.com. I bought it on Amazon. I started reading it early last summer, and couldn't put it down. It is meticulously researched and extremely well-written. I hated it, mainly because of how stupid it told me I was, but also for how it made me almost physically ill about how people, especially those in power with vested interests, think about and manipulate others, and about how the manipulated people are brought to commit heinous acts that are ultimately against their own interests.
During a week surveying railroad in the Mojave Desert, I finished the book and then read it again. It made me understand a lot of things that seemed kind of muddled before, like what my black friends in the military had told me, and where some of the redneck adults from my lower middle class childhood were coming from, and also what a lot of "trouble-making activists" from the 1960's to now were really saying.
While definitely lower middle class on the economic scale, my family has always put huge stock in reading and education. We were raised to never look down on others for their social and economic status. I was taught to look down upon self-proclaimed "elites", and yet to have tastes and education that were usually available only to elites. I later learned that "elites" is a term with a lot of vagueness about it. Academics and elites are definitely two different things, culturally, socially, and economically. Culturally, most "elites" wouldn't know Anatole France from the Tour de France, if they had, in fact, heard of either. Having a college degree (and I DO NOT disparage the accomplishment) does not confer upon the graduate any real claim to academia or even literacy. Often, it seems to be a hurdle that has to be taken and suffered due to family expectations. As a former military officer, I knew fellow officers who were college graduates who were yet barely literate. However unbelievably ignorant they were, they were acceptable, having come from the "right" background.
Thanks to Nancy Isenberg's book, my seventh decade (I recently turned 60) has become far more complex for me. While having been taught NOT to ever despise people of lower social/economic standing, I have to despise many of their prejudices and beliefs. While disliking elites and elitism, I find that many of them share beliefs and tastes with me (although definitely not most of them). Trying (and hopefully achieving at least a fraction) to live an "examined life" has been far more difficult after reading Ms. Isenberg's words. To say the least, learning that Locke was a major shareholder in a slave trade company makes for a certain piquancy while reading his philosophy. My semi-retired life might have been emotionally easier had I not read her book, but I will always be grateful (however annoyed) that I'm less of a stooge of politically acceptable history (not to be confused with the partizan/political battle cry of "politically correct"). In this case, "correct" and truth are two very different things. Thanks, Nancy, for bringing me the truth.
In the last two years of turmoil, I started reading more news online than just the BBC. I discovered Slate and The Economist, and my world view started changing. I ran across a review of this book on Slate.com. I bought it on Amazon. I started reading it early last summer, and couldn't put it down. It is meticulously researched and extremely well-written. I hated it, mainly because of how stupid it told me I was, but also for how it made me almost physically ill about how people, especially those in power with vested interests, think about and manipulate others, and about how the manipulated people are brought to commit heinous acts that are ultimately against their own interests.
During a week surveying railroad in the Mojave Desert, I finished the book and then read it again. It made me understand a lot of things that seemed kind of muddled before, like what my black friends in the military had told me, and where some of the redneck adults from my lower middle class childhood were coming from, and also what a lot of "trouble-making activists" from the 1960's to now were really saying.
While definitely lower middle class on the economic scale, my family has always put huge stock in reading and education. We were raised to never look down on others for their social and economic status. I was taught to look down upon self-proclaimed "elites", and yet to have tastes and education that were usually available only to elites. I later learned that "elites" is a term with a lot of vagueness about it. Academics and elites are definitely two different things, culturally, socially, and economically. Culturally, most "elites" wouldn't know Anatole France from the Tour de France, if they had, in fact, heard of either. Having a college degree (and I DO NOT disparage the accomplishment) does not confer upon the graduate any real claim to academia or even literacy. Often, it seems to be a hurdle that has to be taken and suffered due to family expectations. As a former military officer, I knew fellow officers who were college graduates who were yet barely literate. However unbelievably ignorant they were, they were acceptable, having come from the "right" background.
Thanks to Nancy Isenberg's book, my seventh decade (I recently turned 60) has become far more complex for me. While having been taught NOT to ever despise people of lower social/economic standing, I have to despise many of their prejudices and beliefs. While disliking elites and elitism, I find that many of them share beliefs and tastes with me (although definitely not most of them). Trying (and hopefully achieving at least a fraction) to live an "examined life" has been far more difficult after reading Ms. Isenberg's words. To say the least, learning that Locke was a major shareholder in a slave trade company makes for a certain piquancy while reading his philosophy. My semi-retired life might have been emotionally easier had I not read her book, but I will always be grateful (however annoyed) that I'm less of a stooge of politically acceptable history (not to be confused with the partizan/political battle cry of "politically correct"). In this case, "correct" and truth are two very different things. Thanks, Nancy, for bringing me the truth.
2,448 people found this helpful
Nathália Porto
Great
Reviewed in Brazil on 29 April 2018Great book, With a remarkable historical and media research. I recommend for everyone interested in race and class issues in America.
===
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Jeffrey Keeten
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November 17, 2020
”The white poor have been with us in various guises, as the names they have been given across centuries attest: Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tackies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White niggers. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people.”
My mom was always rather class conscious. I’d make a new friend at school, and the first thing my mother would do was go through my new friend’s family history with me. When I started chasing after girls based more on how long their legs were or how pretty their eyes were, my mother was always quick to inform me if they were really worth my time. She saw every girlfriend as a potential daughter-in-law. I remember with one brown-eyed girl that I thought was the prettiest doe I’d ever seen, my mother informed me in a voice of doom that she was...Catholic. I couldn’t have cared less if she were a Martian. My mother cackled when she found out I was taking a girl from a well-to-do family to prom. She told me that they would never see me as good enough for their daughter.
All of this was rather baffling to me.
After reading this book, I started to really think about how class conscious my mother was. Of course, when I asked a girl to go to the movies or to go for a ride in my car, I wasn’t thinking of her as my future wife. I was just enjoying her company and plotting how best I could steal a kiss. My family was never what I would call elevated. The differences between us and most other people could be measured in hair breadth differences. We were landowning Protestants, and my mother’s family were also landowning Protestants, so that lifted us up to a rung that gave us a thin demarcation line from those who worked for other people. My mother was never malicious about being class conscious; in fact, she regularly helped anyone who needed it. She was definitely someone who would give a person the shirt off her back, regardless of where they fell in the hierarchy of life, but she wanted her sons to find good wives, and finding one, in her opinion, from a similar position in life would insure a better chance for success.
The story of America is the story of the poor. Convict labor, the disadvantaged, and slaves built America. The poor fought our wars. The exemptions for the sons of planters in the South and the ability for those of means in the North to pay someone to take their place in the ranks of soldiers insured that a disproportion of the poor lost their lives for “the cause,” whatever that cause turned out to be.
Nancy Isenberg teaches a class on the 400 year history of class in America. As you read this book, your opinion of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Jackson, and even Pocahontas will alter slightly. Isenberg lifts every rock and reveals some beliefs of people we admire that do not fit the image we have of them. Even though I knew about most of the circumstances she discusses, she illuminates many aspects that I had no idea about. For example, young women were being sent over from England to Virginia in 1620. ”The transportation of female cargo would ‘tye and roote the Planters myndes to Virginia by the bonds of wives and children.’ Sexual satisfaction and heirs to provide for would make slothful men into more productive colonists.”
To defray their transportation costs, the men were expected to trade 150 pounds of tobacco for each of these women. Women are cargo. Women have historically always been considered possessions and passed from father to husband to son, but then that is another subject slightly outside the scope of this book. What is of interest to the main subject is that they (the powers that be) perceived poor men as lazy, and the only thing standing between them and success was being more industrious. Of course, most of the success pours upwards; very little of it stays with the sharecropper who is trying so hard to get ahead to experience some version of the American dream.
Thank goodness he is at least getting laid now!
I was reading a book the other day about a young lieutenant who discovered that his unit being sent to war during WW2 was made up of mostly Southerners, and few of them knew how to read.
This was in 1944.
When I think of poor white trash, my first vision is of a trailer park in Mississippi, not that disadvantaged whites don’t live everywhere in the United States, but the stereotype still brings to mind a state South of the Mason Dixon line. Getting those states to embrace the idea of education for all and recognizing the benefits of an educated population has always been a struggle. Whenever a politician argues that we need to get rid of Federal guidelines and let the states control the direction of education for their residents...I shudder. Of course, there are advantages to keeping people minimally educated. They are easier to manipulate and exploit.
Politicians going back to the 1800s in America realized the importance of convincing poor whites to vote for them. They might even play the fiddle and convort with them for an afternoon before returning to their mansions in the evenings. ”Americans had a taste for what he called a ‘democracy of manners,’ which was not the same as real democracy. He meant that voters accepted huge disparities in wealth but at the same time expected their elected leaders to ‘cultivate the appearance of being no different than the rest of us.’” A man who works on the presses at the company I am part owner of said to me that he was going to vote for Donald Trump because he identified with him more than he did with Hillary Clinton.
Similar genitalia?
During the hotly contested Bush/Kerry race, most of the people who worked for me voted for Bush because they “liked” him better. He was a guy they would feel comfortable having a beer with. I even had one guy tell me that he liked Bush because he was a “dummy like me.”
What the hell?
Personally, I prefer people in the White House a helluva lot smarter than me.
I understand there really isn’t much separation between the parties these days, but there is separation.
It is interesting to me that every 1%er I’ve ever met is a tax expert. They seem to know more about taxes than about the businesses that fuel their livelihood. They certainly know more about taxes than they do about the people whose backs they make a living off of. Interesting enough, Trump’s main support is coming from white people without a college degree. I’m surprised that Trump can even give a speech around that silver spoon, fork, knife, and plate that he was born with filling his mouth. The nugget that has emerged about him that most annoys me is that he hasn’t paid federal income tax for possibly up to two decades. I’ve paid a pile of Federal income tax every year of my life since age 16 and state and local taxes as well. Which leads me into another quote. ”In 2009, the 1 percent paid 5.2 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while the poorest 20 percent paid 10.9 percent. States penalized the poor with impunity.”
This is the American dream?
I’m in the 28% tax bracket. After deductions, I think I come out somewhere around 17% of my income going for taxes. How can it be possible that I pay a higher % in taxes than the very richest Americans? How can the poorest 20% ever climb up another rung on the ladder if they are paying twice as much as the top 1% in state and local taxes? This is a travesty. I’m hanging on to being middle class by my fingernails, but I have nothing to complain about compared to the poorest 20%.
Needless to say, this book will create a lot of discussion among those who read it. The four hundred year history of this country exploiting and discriminating against the poor and manipulating them politically is lurid and made me at times feel queasy. There are some eye opening observations, and the photographs scattered throughout the text help to provide a true visual element to support the research. It made me reevaluate my own place in this universe. I questioned my own preconceived notions about who someone really is. I can only hope that in the process this book has helped shake out the last vestiges of my own brainwashed ideas of class structure.
I have an uncontrollable urge to read The Grapes of Wrath.
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April 8, 2021
“All history is the history of class struggle.” Sound familiar? It should. Well, the actual quote, from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ Communist Manifesto, is “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Doesn’t have quite the same ring, but it gets the job done, however transmogrified it might have been in popular recollection and various translations. And it may or not be the case. Certainly in America one is considered suspect for subscribing to the notion, usually by folks who are better off. But whether class is the be-all and end-all of historical analysis, it would be difficult, and dishonest, to contend that it does not hold, at the very least, a very significant role in human history. It is the history of class in America, and the myths that accompany it, to which Nancy Isenberg has applied her considerable labor and intelligence.
She begins at the beginning, the 1500s. Richard Hakluyt a well-known 16th century writer, promoted development of the New World to the English leaders of the time.
… what Hakluyt foresaw in a colonized America was one giant workhouse. This cannot be emphasized enough. As the “waste firm of America" was settled, it would become a place where the surplus poor, the waste people of England, could be converted into economic assets. The land and the poor could be harvested together, to add to—rather than continue to subtract from—the nation’s wealth. Among the first waves of workers were the convicts, who would be employed at heavy labor, felling trees and burning them for pitch, tar and soap ash; others would dig in the mines for gold, silver, iron, and copper. The convicts were not paid wages. As debt slaves, they were obliged to repay the English commonwealth for their crimes by producing commodities for export. In return they would be kept from a life of crime, avoiding, in Hakluyt’s words, being “miserably hanged,” or packed into prisons to “pitifully pine away” and die.
Large numbers of the earliest Europeans to inhabit these shores were not so much the vaunted seekers after freedom of one sort or another that highlight our usual imagery. They were in fact the social detritus that England was looking to offload. Along with the poor, the criminal, and the unconnected, our mother country dropped off their toxic class system. Even in promotion of the New World in the earliest times, it was portrayed as a place where England could throw out the garbage, or at least put society’s waste people to some use during their brief time above the ground.
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In an addled vision (and altered history) of America, many thought that, for various reasons, the New World was or would be the place where class came to die. You’re kidding me, right? It never was. It is not now, and it never will be. What we have now is less of a class struggle, which implies two opponents, and more of a class massacre. For example, the Republicans propose an ACA replacement that absolutely has to include an extra tax break for CEOs earning more than $500K, while effectively denying coverage to millions and raising costs catastrophically for millions more? Clearly those who have, well those who are of a Republican (Koch-brother-backed) frame of mind and have, seem to think that those of us who do not have shouldn’t. But it has almost always been thus. Isenberg traces the history of class in America, with a specific look at the lower echelons of white America. Slavery, of one sort and another, is never far from the history she describes, but she is not writing about slavery, per se.
She traces the persistence and character of class in America, from its English (and presumably Dutch) roots, up to modern times. She looks at the structures that have enforced a lower level of existence on so many in diverse parts of the nation, with particular attention to the English ideal of connection to (meaning ownership of) land, as a core defining measure of one’s civic virtue. Only those with land were considered worthy of voting. Even after the American Revolution, the old ways persisted:
During the colonial period, the right to vote for the lower house of colonial legislatures had been defined in traditional British terms: Only people who had freehold landed property sufficient to ensure that they were personally independent and had a vested interest in the welfare of their communities could vote. - from The Right to Vote and the Rise of Democracy, 1787–1828 by Donald Ratcliffe
I am nobody’s idea of a history nerd, but I have read a fair bit over the last fifty years or so, and am no virgin at looking at class structures. Yet, I found this book filled with stunning revelations. In particular, the views of some of our foundering fathers are particularly unkind when it comes to working class people. Franklin and Jefferson both believed that the availability of vast swaths of new land would provide all that was needed for the new breed of Americans that was emerging, a safety valve on the social and economic pressures of rising population and limited resources. It did not work out quite as hoped, as the wealthy moved west as well, sucking up most of the good land, and bringing along the means to develop the land, slaves and tools, that less favored pioneers lacked. Franklin was boldly in favor of class distinction:
Franklin understood that maintaining class differences had its own appeal. In the Pennsylvania Gazette, the newspaper he edited, an article was published in 1741 that exposed why people preferred having a class hierarchy to having none. Hierarchy was easily maintained when the majority felt there was someone below them. “How many,” the author asked, “even of the better sort,” would choose to be “Slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and Tyrannical Rule over all below them?” There was something desirable, perhaps even pleasurable, to use Franklin’s utilitarian axiom, in the feeling of lording over subordinate classes.
The notion of breeding is paramount in how class has been viewed over time. It makes it so much easier, I suppose, for the haves to justify their position if they can persuade themselves that those who have not suffer because that is their genetic destiny. Fantasy does become reality often enough as the poor, who often have to struggle just to get fed, watch their children’s development be stunted by malnutrition, some going so far as to eating clay just to feel full, and by a lack of access to good medical care. Some particularly awful examples are noted. Forced sterilization was very much an approach favored by some to keep those they disparaged from reproducing.
We are introduced to a wealth of class slurs from the pages of our past, many of them news to me. Here are a few: Waste people, Clay-eaters, Mudsills, Briar hoppers, sandhillers, lubbers, tackies, scalawags, low-downers, hoe wielders, offscourings, bog-trotters, swamp people. And the more familiar: degenerates, crackers, squatters, rednecks, hillbillies, and trailer trash. And for what it’s worth, some whites were even treated to the n-word.
Isenberg takes us from the teenaged indentured servants of our deep past, when voting with your feet meant running away from an intolerable, and often illegally never-ending indenture, to Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty, from the reality of class exploitation over the centuries to viewing people (not limited to the poor) as cattle, and looking to breed desired traits. From how the poor, particularly lower class whites, were viewed in the 16th century to how they are portrayed in popular media today. She looks at how some have seized on a sort of hillbilly chic to further their own ends.
Isenberg looks at experiments like Oglethorpe’s in Georgia, in which slavery was banned, and how his predictions of what would happen were slavery to be allowed came to pass.
Sometimes Isenberg’s analysis goes a bit too far.
A prison official said it all: “One dies, get another.” Poor whites were inexpensive and expendable and found their lot comparable to suffering African Americans when it came to the justice system. Nothing proves the point better than the fact that both black and white convicts were referred to as "niggers."
The prison systems in America have never treated people decently, but I would find the claim of equal abuse more persuasive were some research offered to back the claim. She also refers to the TV show The Honeymooners as a satire about the working class. It was nothing of the sort. What it was was a situation comedy that portrayed working class life, during a time when the norm was to show an idealized suburban Ozzie and Harriet world. It was not satirizing working class people, but bringing them to viewers’ consciousness. I would have liked a strong, overt connection to have been made between the mean-spirited right of today. (Why are these people so bloody cold-hearted towards the poor?) and the extant views of the poor from history. There is DNA to be traced there, even if it is mostly the history of excuse-making for hating on those lower down on the ladder.
Overall, I found White Trash wonderfully, if depressingly informative. Any who are foolish enough to see America as a class-free place would do well to check this book out. Class is as real today as it has ever been, and merits our attention as an ever growing number of people are being pushed by automation, globalization, and seizure of more and more of the nation’s wealth by the wealthy, into the lower rungs of class distinction. Any who are interested in American history, in how we got from there to here, are in for a real treat. But whether or not you have a particular interest in American history or class, particularly my fellow and sister Americans, I would urge you to give White Trash a look. The myth of equality of opportunity in America has never been clearer. You have nothing to lose but the chains of ignorance.
Publication date – June 21, 2016
Review posted – March 10, 2017
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Links to the author’s personal, and Twitter pages
More items by Isenberg
-----NY Daily News opinion piece - Donald Trump’s perverse class war -November 2, 2016
-----Salon - American history: Fake news that never goes away — and empowered the Trumpian insurrection - “Fake history is fake news, only more widely believed.”
Interviews
-----The Baffler - Born and Bred - Q & A with Nancy Isenberg - by Emily Carroll - November 07, 2016
Audio
-----On the Media ’White Trash’ and Class in America by Brooke Gladstone
-----WNYC – How America's Landless Poor Defined Politics for Generations - by Leonard Lopate
-----The Takeaway – The Angry Ghost of America's Unresolved Class Warfare - 8:59
Video
-----PBS News Hour - The origin of ‘white trash,’ & why class is still an issue - by Jeffrey Brown
Other
-----February 3, 2018 - NY Times - Who’s Able-Bodied Anyway? by Emily Badger and Margot Sanger-Katz - a familiar extra-legal method for keeping people from getting needed benefits, reveling in a notion of some people as being undeserving of public aid
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February 13, 2020
“If this book accomplishes anything it will be to have exposed a number of myths about the American dream, to have disabused readers of the notion that upward mobility is a function of the founders’ ingenious plan…”
Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America is a tour de force of research and hard-hitting assessments of our country’s attitude toward the “poor” and “shiftless” masses. It delves into the historical inaccuracies and missteps of a nation, our nation, and is a read to be savored and thoughtfully digested.
Isenberg commences from the stance that she is addressing the fallacious and glossed-over condition of class relations in the U.S., because many Americans (truly, the world) genuinely believe in America as a classless society of un-threatened upward mobility potential. Firstly, if there is, in fact, someone—anyone—out there who honestly believes that class relations don’t exist front and center in America then 1) you need to run and grab this book (and 10 more just like it immediately, now, on your lunch break even!) and 2) might I ask, “What rock have you been hiding under?”
Nancy Isenberg’s survey of American culture from Plymouth Rock to Sarah Palin offers something for everyone. Here she unravels history and popularized tales of John Locke, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, the “cracker” president, and even Pocahontas has her Disney-romanticized “diva” status stripped away and re-examined. Isenberg methodically tackles the rise and fall of the Confederacy, the eugenics craze that swept America for decades (still seen today in the form of modern-day dating websites such as eHarmony and Match.com), “The New Deal,” LBJ’s “Great Society” policies, desegregation and shifts in American culture that led to the rise of modern-day “white trash reality TV.” And while I did feel a bit leaden down with the dozens of pages of historical facts on these former presidents in Part I, when I was more interested in the meat of the argument, the task of setting the foundation for her argument was achieved, and Part II onward flowed seamlessly. Historical documentation, photographs and illustrations also helped to set the scene and illustrate her assertions in a way that was easily digestible.
With White Trash, Isenberg demands us to ask ourselves, “What really is the American dream? Does it really exist? And if not, what truly stands in its stead?” These are the questions that you will explore, sometimes overtly and sometimes not. She offers some truly eye-opening observations and threads together the fabric of our American history into a full picture for readers to take a step back from and justly scrutinize. Within these pages, you’ll find humor and biting wit, punchlines that sink deeply into your psyche and assertions that are backed by meticulous research.
Isenberg takes a clear and definitive stance in White Trash, writing specifically from a poor-white-centric lens, and honestly, that really appealed to me. Thankfully, she strips away the politically correct, granola pedagogy that we Americans like to think of as good manners and gets straight to the point of her argument: that the idea of American classlessness is a fanciful notion that never truly existed, and that poor whites have always been a significant force at the center of the debate. From the annihilation of Native Americans to the freeing of slaves, from the Great Depression to desegregation, poor whites have always factored in, in some way, to the persistent class struggle at hand.
For both those who feel securely aware of the condition of the world around us and for those not as confident in their versing of the historical foundation of the very American soil that we stand on, take a trip down this historical rabbit hole, because here you will find a detailed chronicle to expand upon your current understanding and opinions. You’ll find an analysis that is as ripe with raw insights as it is well-researched. Isenberg takes a blunt stance, a no-nonsense stance, and that always wins the day with me as long as the claims are buoyed in verity. She did that here, and her White Trash gained a strong 4 stars in the process. ****
*Thanks again to Viking for reaching out to me and sending me a hardcover copy of this book!
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Miranda Reads
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December 11, 2020
I initially read the title and reserved this book under the impression that this would be a humorous look into white trash history.
I assumed wrong.
This was the history of the poor, white American as I've never heard it before.
Americans lack any deeper appreciation of class. Beyond white anger and ignorance is a far more complicated history of class identity that dates back to America’s colonial period and British notions of poverty.
The history (unsurprisingly) constantly cycles - going from blaming the whites for being poor, legally taking money/houses/children and going back to blaming them for being poor. And at the start of said cycle, was the British colonists.
British colonists promoted a dual agenda: one involved reducing poverty back in England, and the other called for transporting the idle and unproductive to the New World.
The main pain I had with this book - it spans 400 years. There isn't a consistency in characters and many people only stick around for 5 or less years. Thus, keeping track of who is who was a bit difficult.
Yes, is a history book so there isn't much wiggle-room with characters. I almost wish it could have spanned fewer years to circumvent having to include so many folks But then we wouldn't have gotten the full picture. Ah well, six of one, half dozen of the other.
Also, as I mentioned earlier, the history cycles. A few times, I had to page back a bit to see if I had already read it or if it was something that just sounded similar. Again, if the book spanned fewer centuries then it probably would've held my attention better.
Overall, this book was eye-opening and its sheer breadth of information was incredible.
Audiobook Comments
Read by Kirsten Potter and while she was a good reader, this book was still SO freaking boring that it was a bit difficult to listen to.
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October 1, 2016
In All the King’s Men, Robert Penn’s classic novel of American politics, the protagonist is Willie Stark, the demagogic and corrupt governor of an unnamed state (Willie is based on Huey Long of Louisiana). The tragedy of Willie – and All the King’s Men is an archetypal tragedy – is that he started out as a good man. He was a backcountry bumpkin who managed to rise out of poverty to become an idealistic young lawyer. Willie runs for County Treasurer promising transparency and honesty. He loses to the establishment candidate, a man known for corruption and self-dealing. The man who beats Willie accepts a low bid to build a school, taking a kickback as payment. Willie’s career takes off after an accident at the shoddily-constructed school kills three kids. Suddenly Willie the Incorruptible is a hot property. A local Democratic faction decides to run him as a gubernatorial candidate. Not because they want him to win, but because they want Willie to split the rube vote, so that their chosen candidate has a better shot.
In a brilliant scene, Willie finds out that he’s being used. To everyone's surprise, he lashes out. He stands before a crowd, dispensing with his prepared remarks, and starts talking about his own “hick” upbringing.
“It’s a funny story,” he said. “Get ready to laugh. Get ready to bust your sides for it is sure a funny story. It’s about a hick. It’s about a redneck, like you all, if you please. Yeah, like you. He grew up like any other mother’s son on the dirt roads and gully washes of a north-state farm. He knew all about being a hick. He knew what it was to get up before day and get cow dung between his toes and feed and slop and milk before breakfast so he could set off by sunup to walk six miles to a one-room, slab-sided schoolhouse. He knew what it was to pay high taxes for that windy shack of a schoolhouse and those gully-washed red-clay roads to walk over – or to break his wagon axle or string-halt his mules on.”
After giving his own background, Willie gets to his passionate call for action:
He leaned at them and said, “Listen to me, you hicks. Listen here and lift up your eyes and look on the God’s blessed and unflyblown truth. If you’ve got the brain of a sapsucker left and can recognize the truth when you see it. This is the truth; you are a hick and nobody ever helped a hick but the hick himself…"
I was thinking about this scene as I read Nancy Isenberg’s timely new book, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. Because that’s who her story is about. The hicks. Of course, as Isenberg points out, they have many other names. “Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tackies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies…White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people.”
Isenberg’s purpose in writing White Trash is to puncture the myth of American equality, the notion that we are a classless society, all with the same opportunity for success as everybody else. To do so, she undertakes a reevaluation of American history through the prism of class, specifically, by highlighting the forgotten and impoverished. Think of it as A Poor People’s History of the United States. In this way, Isenberg also hopes to help us “better appreciate the gnawing contradictions still present in modern American society.”
Isenberg tries to cover a lot of ground in just 321 pages. She starts with the early colonization of America, with heavy emphasis on reframing the meanings of Plymouth and Jamestown, and ends with Bill Clinton and Sarah Palin. It’s almost enough to give you whiplash. White Trash works best when it coheres around a set-piece event, slowing things down with focus and detail. The section on eugenics, and on the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Buck vs. Bell, is especially effective in this way. So too is Isenberg’s eye-opening discussion on indentured servitude in early America.
White Trash is not what I’d classify as popular history. The topic is not conducive to a narrative approach, and Isenberg does not try to force it into one. Rather, this is academic history. Isenberg has a position to argue, and she supports her thesis with a wide-ranging survey of sources. She does, however, make every attempt at accessibility. This is not a book aimed solely at college professors. Sure, she spends a lot of time quoting from the now-obscure 16th century writer/promoter Richard Hakluyt, who foresaw America as a kind of penal colony or trash bin, where the undesirables of England could be quarantined. But she also delves into pop culture, peering into the meaning behind Deliverance, The Andy Griffith Show, Elvis Presley, and Bill Clinton’s appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show.
This is not a perfect book. At times, I thought Isenberg oversold the conclusions to be drawn from the evidence. Moving the spotlight from one group to another necessarily creates shadows. In putting the poor front and center, race becomes secondary. There were moments when Isenberg came uncomfortably close to equating the experiences of poor whites with those of blacks. (Her proposition that the American Civil War was a class war is a huge stretch). On some level, all poverty is the same. But the difference between the black poor and the white poor throughout history is massive. Whites got called nasty names and were generally forgotten or ignored by the government. Blacks, on the other hand, were statutorily and legislatively set apart as inferior beings, their subordinate status written into the books of the law. That’s a big deal.
In any event, Isenberg could have made it clearer that race and class are not a zero sum game. The only people who want us to discuss either one or the other are the people protecting the status quo. Pitting marginalized groups against each other is the easiest way to ensure nothing ever changes.
Another oddity is a lack of poor white voices. This is a volume filled with commentary on the poor, but almost all of that commentary comes from elites. We hear a lot about what Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson had to say about the lower classes. We hear far less about the experience of poverty itself, or how the poor defined themselves against the backdrop of the cosmos. It’s almost an act of meta-condescension. I understand that there is probably a dearth of primary accounts from early colonial squatters. There’s no excuse, though, when we get up to the Great Depression.
My final critique is that White Trash goes to great lengths in describing how America thought about the poor. It gives very little by way of explanation as to why the poor found themselves impoverished. Isenberg details the physical ravages of poverty in the stunted, jaundiced, hook-wormed, straw-haired forms of the backcountry poor. She does not explain how they got to this point. This leads to a queasy and unspoken implication that maybe all the elitist critics were right. Maybe the poor were a lower breed, unable to rise from the muck. Maybe they are lazy, ingrown hicks.
This is nonsense, of course. The structural disadvantages faced by the poor were built into the American system from the beginning, when democracy meant that everyone had a say, as long as that person was a white, landowning male. Take, for example, the history of America’s westward expansion, which is also the history of public-private corruption, self-dealing, and trading on insider knowledge. Many of the brave pioneers we still extol ended up as squatters on the land they secured at the risk of their lives. They often lost everything to people who never risked more than capital. (The losses suffered by the Indians belongs in a different category altogether). The real winners of the west were the bankers and lawyers, the investors and speculators, and the crooked politicians who helped partition huge swaths of public land for the private benefit of the few. Isenberg mentions some of these systemic issues, but doesn’t give them depth. I think that’s a shame, because without them, there is a lingering sense of otherness given to the poor, a notion they chose their lot and were content to suffer it.
With that said, Isenberg makes a powerful statement about giving poor whites their due, not just historically but today.
[The poor] are blamed for living on bad land, as though they had other choices. From the beginning, they have existed in the minds of rural or urban elites and the middle class as extrusions of the weedy, unproductive soil. They are depicted as slothful, rootless vagrants, physically scarred by their poverty. The worst ate clay and turned yellow, wallowed in mud and muck, and their necks became burned by the hot sun. Their poorly clothed, poorly fed children generated what others believed to be a permanent and defective breed…We think of the left-behind groups as extinct, and the present as a time of advanced thought and sensibility. But today’s trailer trash are merely yesterday’s vagrants on wheels, an updated version of Okies in jalopies and Florida crackers in their carts.
Any book that dares take on American foundational myths is bound to stir up passions. That’s especially true with class, which along with race, is a particularly sensitive issue. White Trash might make you angry. It might make a lot of people angry. But it’s going to make different people angry for different reasons. Frankly, this is a book I grappled with. I even took down some notes as I read it, as though I were having a dialogue. I don’t agree with all the conclusions. That’s nearly beside the point. This is a discussion that needs to be had. This is, in fact, an important book for understanding what is happening today, all around us.
(Reviewer's note: I received a copy of White Trash from the publisher, in exchange for an honest review)
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January 28, 2023
“How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or indeed accommodate, its persistently marginalized people?”
White Trash: Isenberg Nancy : Isenberg: Amazon.it: Libri
In White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg shows the ways in which Americans have both recognized and embodied the lower classes of our society. This was a fascinating history from beginning to end, maybe more so because this history has not entirely played out. This bottom rung of American society has variously been denigrated as waste people, offals, lubbers, clay eaters, rednecks, hillbillies and perhaps most famously, white trash. The examination of white trash history from pre-Revolution squatters to Andrew Jackson’s presidency to present political debates is intermixed with references to popular culture (such as The Beverly Hillbillies, Deliverance and Duck Dynasty) and literature (such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird) is prominent in this discussion. Isenberg argues that these representations don’t just show us poor white trash, but are a reflection of American identity.
“Poor whites are still taught to hate—but not to hate those who are keeping them in line. Lyndon Johnson knew this when he quipped, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
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July 19, 2016
Of the good: Isenberg argues that we do not give the history of poor whites nearly the due it deserves, and makes a striking claim for the centrality of that history to any understanding of the United States. It's a provocative position, and one that she makes good with - following her train of thought from the colonial period to the present day, it's clear that we are a nation obsessed with class distinctions, peddling a mythology of the exact opposite.
Of the not-so good: Isenberg does not give us the voices of the poor in this text. Instead we read what middle- and upper-class people think about class and poverty. That's important, particularly as few poor people had access to power and few poor people were setting policies; we need to understand the mental gymnastics of politicians and cultural thinkers on this subject. But it is a decided oddity that the poor themselves are never asked what they think or what they want, and leaves the reader with the impression that the poor have no needs or solutions they can articulate. I find that hard to believe.
In addition, there's a lot missing from this book. Isenberg skips over immigration practices in the north during the 19th century; she skips World War II; she skips over the George W. Bush presidency. There's no mention of child labor, or of reform efforts to change that practice, limit the workday, or allow people to unionize. Surely these, too, are to do with class? And race is not recognized as the bedfellow of class in nearly enough instances - practices like the widespread lynching of African American men by whites (including working and poor whites) are not mentioned. That seems a strange omission.
I enjoyed the book and I learned a great deal. But I'm ready for the books that come after this one, in which Isenberg's omissions become the stuff of continuing conversation.
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July 30, 2016
While reading this extraordinary history of the white underclass in America, I was reminded of how much of my life was spent in and around house trailers. I’m not talking about those doublewide, wannabe condos with designer touches, landscaped lawns, and air-conditioned club houses a short golf-cart ride away. I’m talking about 10-12 feet wide, 60-80 feet long pill-shaped homes that still have the tires attached. My mom and dad brought me home to such a trailer when I was born. Almost all of my cousins lived in trailers until they left home. All of my grandparents lived in trailers when they left their small Missouri farms or their small Chicago apartments. My last two years in college, I lived in a trailer manufactured in 1950 that my grandmother bought for me for $1000 in 1970. I paid $35 for a lot to park it on near Indiana University where I was an undergraduate. It made it possible for me to graduate debt free in spite of my working class origins.
I mention all of this because those working class origins were absolutely invisible to me until I was in my early 20’s. Trailers weren’t working class dwellings, let alone underclass dwellings. They were my family’s dwellings, as natural and normal as my dad’s can of Hamm’s beer every evening after work and my mom’s biscuits and gravy every Sunday after church. It was just how things were.
Historian Nancy Isenberg tells the 400-year-long story of social class in America, especially the white social class that we never read about in high school. We heard about the founding of Jamestown, for instance, but we never learned that most of those people brought here in the 17th century were not adventurously seeking a newer world. They were criminals and vagrants, unemployed and often-homeless people rounded up from London and elsewhere in order to get rid of them. In the words of John White, a landowner in early America, “Colonies ought to be Emunctories or Sinkes of States, to drayne away the filth.” The New World promised easy wealth, for those willing to take financial risks, but it also offered a landfill to dump those who had no resources and who were a financial liability for the English homeland.
150 years later, when Andrew Jackson came to office, the descendants of this “filth” were still around. “They lived off the grid, rarely attended a school or joined a church, and remained a potent symbol of poverty. To be lower class in rural America was to be one of the landless. They disappeared into unsettled territory and squatted down anywhere and everywhere. …They were to be spread about as scrub foliage, or in bestial terms, mangy varmints infesting the land.” Poor whites were “squatters,” “crackers,” and sometimes, before the Civil War, the "N" word.
But mostly they were without land, and thus without economic security or political agency. We have to remember, in spite of the ringing words that follow from “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” that “all men” while obviously not including women or blacks or natives, also did not include white men who were landless. And that was most of white men, all of their wives, and all of their children. Perhaps 70-80% of the people who were here before the Civil War were disenfranchised. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t useful. Almost all of those who fought in the Civil War never had a say in whether it would or would not be fought. In the north Teddy Roosevelt’s father bought himself a substitute to fight for him since he didn’t want to hurt his wife, who was born in the south. Teddy never got over that, which may partially explain his extraordinary eagerness to go to war. In the south, no landowners were required to fight, or even to pay for a substitute. White landless men, who had absolutely no stake in the outcome, were drafted and killed in large numbers. Gentlemen plantation owners, meanwhile, could serve as officers if they chose. After all, they had something to lose.
And so it went on, through two World Wars, Korea, Viet Nam, and Iraq. Those mostly in the direct line of fire were working class men and women, without college educations, without financial resources, without political power. The working class, both black and white, has served as cannon fodder for most of America’s military actions. Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, George Bush, not so much.
I want to make a turn here, because this history of social class is so relevant to what is happening right now. In another new book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” J.D. Vance, a Yale law school graduate, recalls growing up in poor white southern Ohio. In a recent interview he applies what he had learned about “his people” and the places where they live as the 2016 election approaches.
“What many don’t understand is how truly desperate these places are, and we’re not talking about small enclaves or a few towns–we’re talking about multiple states where a significant chunk of the white working class struggles to get by. Heroin addiction is rampant. In my medium-sized Ohio county last year, deaths from drug addiction outnumbered deaths from natural causes. The average kid will live in multiple homes over the course of her life, experience a constant cycle of growing close to a “stepdad” only to see him walk out on the family, know multiple drug users personally, maybe live in a foster home for a bit (or at least in the home of an unofficial foster like an aunt or grandparent), watch friends and family get arrested, and on and on. And on top of that is the economic struggle, from the factories shuttering their doors to the Main Streets with nothing but cash-for-gold stores and pawn shops.
The two political parties have offered essentially nothing to these people for a few decades. From the Left, they get some smug condescension, an exasperation that the white working class votes against their economic interests because of social issues, a la Thomas Frank. Maybe they get a few handouts, but many don’t want handouts to begin with.
From the Right, they’ve gotten the basic Republican policy platform of tax cuts, free trade, deregulation, and paeans to the noble businessman and economic growth. Whatever the merits of better tax policy and growth, the simple fact is that these policies have done little to address a very real social crisis. More importantly, these policies are culturally tone deaf: nobody from southern Ohio wants to hear about the nobility of the factory owner who just fired their brother.
Trump’s candidacy is music to their ears. He criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas. His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground. He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of people wish they could do but can’t because they lack a platform.”
The ascendency of Trumpism, in other words, has been 400 years in the making. By hardwiring wealth and social class into our constitution, our educational system, and our cultural assumptions, we have ourselves created a moment of serious crisis.
So why didn’t I learn about all this in school?
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Jeanette
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October 5, 2016
2.5 star to be fair. It's written poorly, first of all. It could easily have been edited to half of its size for the pure information it contained in total. It's verbose and with immense repetition of basically what is a colonist theory detailing to origins of present class barriers in the USA. As if the point that there ARE definitive class bars and levels within the USA and that it is not a classless society just because it is a republic is some kind of epiphany. It's hard for me to imagine an intelligent observation of the opposite assumption. Not just in the USA either. In any society and culture there are class recognition criteria. And in most they are immense to association and to ultimate work, as well.
It's too bad that it was not organized better. And that the title was not more accurate too. This has been "untold" before now? No. The only thing she changes in the telling are some of the connotations for her and other groups she "knows" definitions of "Trash".
Nevertheless, the entire "victim" designation she entails in the predetermination of such inadequacies "always being with us"- is problematic. Because I see exceptions of change continually. One very poor Arkansas boy with a single Mom became President of the USA. Oddly, that rather undercuts many of her majority assumptions to others' evaluations of worth. Affirmative action alone has given the very poorest a larger advantage to access the highest educational costs, for instance. For 50 years this has been absolutely true in my state. If you visit the top rated universities in the USA, the Middle class American background is the class most often missing of representation.
Also, IMHO, the balance of origins (how they got here, where they came from) is too heavy in her definitions of that class as it exists now, while the balance of family systems and support throughout migrations and changes for work access in the last 100 years is way too light.
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Shauna Howard
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July 22, 2016
This book could easily be the only American history book that one would need to read to gain a greater understanding on the socio-economic problems in America. I'm not sure how I found it, but this book is one of the most informative books that I will probably read this year. Because of this book, I refuse to have any discussions about racism in the United States unless the conversation includes a willingness to take a historical "step back" & understand how classism & capitalism has failed everyone except the top 1%.
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