White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg
I'd give this book 3 1/2 stars. It's an interesting but not too particularly surprising look at class politics, specifically the intra white class politics where the poor have always been looked down upon. The book starts in chronological order starting with the first colonists in America but I find it useful to go in reverse chronological order. The grand narrative is found in the epilogue.
It states simply that America never has been a meritocracy, people never have, holistically, been able to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, and elites have forever needed to explain that discrepancy. The did/do it by substituting heredity and blame on the poor themselves. You see echos of this in the jokes during 2012 election when people joked that Romney and Huntsman's kids should intermarry to produce beautiful, smart, wealthy children. You see it in liberals talking about smart elitist types wanting to marry other smart highly educated elitist types, while blaming the poor electoral decisions on the poor who vote against their own interests ( their interests usually being how to reduce the problems of their woeful existence). You see it in Conservatives' angst that the poor are marrying other poor whose genes will only produce more dumb stupid children so implicitly only the rich and wealthy "who can afford kids" should breed.
You can trace those modern examples through eugenics that compared breeding people to breeding horses. (One example during the eugenics craze was that women would sign a pledge to only marry a man after she had seen his genealogical pedigree) to the original aristocratic idea that there are some amount of surplus people that simply have no use and must be 'disposed of' in some way, that being that conscripted into armies, or sent to do dangerous labor, etc.
The book also talks about the cultural aspect of 'white trash'. How through the 60's, 70's, and 80's, as the 'New South' rose in economic power, a kind of 'white trash chic' appeared. These new 'chic white trash' didn't conform to middle class standards but were also admired for their forthrightness. You can see examples in Dolly Parton and Elvis (the son of a sharecropper). This new 'white trash chic' didn't transfer approval to all poor whites though. The poorest of white trash was still an object of scorn a la Honey Boo Boo. The book does make a defense of Sarah Palin's 'country-ness' and points out how liberals used the white trash stereotype to push against Palin. The book also talks about Jimmy Carter, who ran as a 'Bubba' but who also denied having any part of the stereotype of a redneck. He ran on being smart, truthful, intelligent and not flamboyant while the media and nation, seeking a confirmation of the stereotype, found one in Jimmy Carter's brother, Billy Carter. Also included is Bill Clinton, who was a 'Bubba' but whose Rhodes Scholarship insulated him a bit from the charge of being a complete redneck.
Interestingly the book sets up the Republicans as being the high class snobs looking down at the two 'white trash' liberal Presidents we had. Nancy Reagan had the White House stripped and complained that the Carters had made the White House a 'pigsty' while Republicans blasted Clinton as no good white trash who double dealed, lied, and cheated (all white trash attributes) and tarnished the high class Hollywoodism Reagan brought to the office. The book traces this dynamic back to the scalawags, people who were supposed to be white trash but who usurped their rightful place in the order of things by claiming that blacks deserved the same rights as whites and/or that poor whites deserved more than what the upper classes handed down.
The most interesting parts of the book are the first parts. The book starts out with the idea that American revisionism has cast the original settlers as intrepid entrepreneurs or, perhaps, religious exiles seeking a better life, when in reality, America was very much imagined as Australia once was, a refuse bin with which to throw the useless white trash of Britain out. Some 60% of the settlers came here for 'economic reasons' mainly being in debt or sent to America to avoid debt. Even in the original colonies, America wasn't envisioned as some egalitarian land, but very much had a landed aristocracy who tried to replicate much of British aristocracy. In the same way that America as a whole was thought of as a way to get rid of white trash, westward expansion was seen as a way to get rid of the 'white trash' in America as well. Let them settle the hinterlands, while the slave owning aristocrats had thousands of good acres. Benjamin Franklin started off poor, but through having patrons became extremely rich. This didn't stop him from blaming the poor for their own problems. (He once complained that the poor moved aimlessly without a purpose forgetting that his move to Philadelphia was simply to get away from trouble). The book also gives an account of Jefferson and Madison and their political ideas all revolved around the same aristocratic idea of what to do with the landed gentry vs the poor white trash living in hovels and the nature of the work that each did.
That fulcrum of how society should be ordered continued through to the Civil War. If people thought the Civil War was merely fought over tariffs, this expanded out the cultural war to be two ways of viewing the civilizational order pitted against each other. The South continued the old British aristocratic idea, that there were a subset of people that bore civilization and there were those beneath them, be they slaves or white trash whose purpose was either to support the rich (and who in turn would be paternalistically loved by the rich), or die. The North on the other hand believed that slavery ruined not only the slaves (who were a bit of a secondary concern) but also the poor white trash who had no work because the free labor provided by the slaves and also made slaveholders slothful. The South, in turn, believed the North to be pure white trash, full of Irish and German immigrants who were dumb and slow who were taken advantage of by the wealth industrialists. The North also used psych-ops during the war, purposefully burning and looting the wealthy while leaving the poor alone to get the point across that the wealthy were the problem. The South were always afraid of the poor whites rising against the slave owners, and, in fact, desertions because the poor were 'fighting a rich man's war' were more common in the South than in the North.
Last edited by Huehuecoyotl; 03-27-2017 at 01:20 PM.