White trash The 400-year untold history of class in America

Nancy Isenberg

Book - 2016

"A history of the class system in America from the colonial era to the present illuminates the crucial legacy of the underprivileged white demographic, citing the pivotal contributions of lower-class white workers in wartime, social policy, and the rise of the Republican Party,"--NoveList.

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Subjects
Published
New York, New York : Viking [2016]
Language
English
Main Author
Nancy Isenberg (author)
Physical Description
460 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780670785971
  • List of Illustrations
  • Preface
  • Introduction: Fables We Forget By
  • Part I. To Begin the World Anew
  • Chapter 1. Taking Out the Trash: Waste People in the New World
  • Chapter 2. John Locke's Lubberland: The Settlements of Carolina and Georgia
  • Chapter 3. Benjamin Franklin's American Breed: The Demographics of Mediocrity
  • Chapter 4. Thomas Jefferson's Rubbish: A Curious Topography of Class
  • Chapter 5. Andrew Jackson's Cracker Country: The Squatter as Common Man
  • Part II. Degeneration of the American Breed
  • Chapter 6. Pedigree and Poor White Trash: Bad Blood, Half-Breeds, and Clay-Eaters
  • Chapter 7. Cowards, Poltroons, and Mudsills: Civil War as Class Warfare
  • Chapter 8. Thoroughbreds and Scalawags: Bloodlines and Bastard Stock in the Age of Eugenics
  • Chapter 9. Forgotten Men and Poor Folk: Downward Mobility and the Great Depression
  • Chapter 10. The Cult of the Country Boy: Elvis Presley, Andy Griffith, and LBJ's Great Society
  • Part III. The White Trash Makeover
  • Chapter 11. Redneck Roots: Deliverance, Billy Beer, and Tammy Faye
  • Chapter 12. Outing Rednecks: Slumming, Slick Willie, and Sarah Palin
  • Epilogue: America's Strange Breed: The Long Legacy of White Trash
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

Historian Isenberg's voluminous, extremely readable book is enormous in scope and sharp in focus. Her argument is grounded in the idea of a mythology of poor whiteness. In her book's early sections, Isenberg uses figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Jackson, along with popular icons from Davy Crockett to Elvis Presley, to explore how poor whiteness was constructed (concepts such as the "cracker" and the namesake "white trash") and poor whites consequently treated--politically, socially, and culturally. Though the book's scope is significant, it is also narrow. Primarily focusing on the South, Isenberg (Louisiana State Univ.), perhaps by necessity, largely omits the "white" (in contemporary concept more than America's, historically) immigrant ghettos of the Northeast Corridor. The intersections of class with non-whiteness, or the ways in which class status might foster and encourage racism in some eras, is only a small part of her puzzle. Courses that might use this book as a primary text (perhaps a semester's exploration of class in US history) will certainly need to supplement with others to explore the multifarious nature of class and poverty in the US. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. --Jennifer L Cote, University of Saint Joseph

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review

THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS, by Dominic Smith. (Picador, $16.) A 17th-century Dutch painting and a forgery of it kick off a highbrow mystery. After the painting is stolen from Marty de Groot, whose family had owned it for generations, Marty's streak of bad luck comes to an end. Years later, the hidden commonalities between him, the artist - the only female painter in a Dutch guild at the time - and the painting's forger come into full view. WHITE TRASH: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg. (Penguin, $17.) This masterly cultural history traces the United States' changing relationship to white poverty - from Britain's desire to banish its undesirable citizens to North America, to the stigmas and epithets attached to the underclass, to racial anxieties about becoming a "mongrel" nation. EVERYONE BRAVE IS FORGIVEN, by Chris Cleave. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) In 1939 London, Mary North is given a teaching job just as the city's students are evacuated, leaving behind only those who are mentally impaired, disabled or black. Cleave drew upon his grandparents' correspondence for his novel, which our reviewer, Michael Callahan, praised for its "ability to stay small and quiet against the raging tableau of war." OPERATION THUNDERBOLT: Flight 139 and the Raid on Entebbe Airport, the Most Audacious Hostage Rescue Mission in History, by Saul David. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18.99.) In 1976, hijackers forced the pilot of an Air France flight en route from Tel Aviv to Paris to land in Entebbe, Uganda, and took the plane's passengers hostage. David recounts the episode in thrilling, minute-by-minute detail, with attention to the masterminds behind the hijacking and the Israeli government's decision to carry out the dangerous rescue mission. THE SUN IN YOUR EYES, by Deborah Shapiro. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $14.99.) It's been 10 years since Viv and Lee, the daughter of a musician who died when she was a child, lived together in college, and nearly three since Lee all but dropped from view. But when she suddenly appears, asking Viv to join her on a quest to recover her father's unfinished album, the trip offers both women a chance at closure. THE RETURN: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, by Hisham Matar. (Random House, $17.) Matar's father, a prominent Libyan dissident, disappeared into a notorious regime prison in 1990; his fate remains unknown. This memoir, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2016, examines the grief of a family left in the dark, with meditations on dictatorship and art's capacity to console.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 9, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review

Most people are well aware of what terms are not acceptable when talking about different races or ethnicities. But what about terms denoting class? Isenberg takes a close look at the history of poor whites in America and asks readers why it is seemingly acceptable to use such terms as white trash, crackers, and rednecks to describe this group of people. The narrative goes back to pre-colonial times, when Great Britain realized America could function as one giant workhouse. Poor indentured servants were sent overseas in droves, with the hope that a life of hard work would train their offspring to be better members of society. Benjamin Franklin continued this train of thought, believing that idleness could be bred out of people. Somewhere along the way, though, not everyone got the memo, and the stigma of coming from white trash still exists American exceptionalism be damned. Turning to the present day, Isenberg covers everything from Bill Clinton to country-boy culture to the rise of redneck reality TV. The history here can sometimes be dense, but the author delivers a thought-provoking discourse on an important social issue.--Vnuk, Rebecca Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Isenberg tackles a topic rarely addressed by mainstream American writing on race and class as she skillfully demonstrates that "class defines how real people live." Isenberg highlights how social power brokers (including politicians, lawmakers, psychiatrists, and sociologists, writers of newspaper and literature) play a role in defining and reinforcing class in America. Actress Potter reads this complicated text with the solemnity and respect Isenberg's prose deserves. In particular, Potter proves a master of emphasis, moving through each sentence and balancing the need to move forward with the need to vocally capture the sentence's meaning. Her voice has a low but soft quality to it that makes it enjoyable to listen to, while her ability to strike meaning into each sentence keeps listeners engaged through this fascinating history. A Viking hardcover. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Isenberg (Fallen Founder) sets out to find the lower classes that, over time, have been variously cast as degraded, despoiled, and even demented. In doing so, the author argues that their presence and persistence counters the promise of American progress, for it suggests that class was, and is, more resilient than the American Dream would have it. Failing populist moments, the white "trash" remained disfranchised and dismissed, or feared for their supposed debilitating effects on morality. Isenberg takes the long view, from the convicts that the British transported to the colonies to segregationists, "trailer trash," the friendly yokelism and folk "wisdom" of The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Show and now Duck Dynasty. The author largely identifies "white trash" as a Southern phenomenon (the urban poor are not part of the society surveyed) but provides an astonishingly wide and copious canvas by describing the ways "white trash" appeared or were seen as individuals of concern in popular culture, political rhetoric, scientific theories, pseudoscientific policies, and literature. The narrative incorporates people as varied as Lyndon B. Johnson, Harper Lee, and Tammy Faye Bakker to show that the exceptions to the supposed American exceptionalism were, and are, its fundamental fact and foil. VERDICT Essential reading for a new perspective on the role of class in American society.-Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A rigorously researched study of the entrenched system of racial classification that dispels many myths about American national identity.In this impressive work of social history, Isenberg (American History/Louisiana State Univ.; Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, 2007, etc.) challenges head-on America's "fable of class denial." From the first indentured servants brought to Plymouth and Jamestown to the caricatured hillbillies of Duck Dynasty, the existence of "waste" people, or impoverished, ignorant, landless whites, has persistently run against convenient notions of the upstanding American founderi.e., moral, hardworking "entrepreneurial stewards of the exploitable land." Dumped on the Colonies, the vagrant, often criminal poor from England and elsewhere were considered expendable and often exploited. As a key to the story, Isenberg looks at the early settlement of North Carolina, which became a "renegade territory, a swampy refuge for the poor and landless," situated between elite Virginians and slaveholding "upstart" South Carolinians. Contrary to the mythmaking of the exceptional early American in writings by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, based on theories of "good breeding" and yeomanry, a whole class of common people grew up as a byproduct of the slaveholding states, living on the margins of the plantations: dirt-poor Southerners (literally "clay-eaters") who were considered lazy and racially degenerate. Moreover, the enormous new swaths of Western land were largely populated by a new class of "squatters" or "crackers," considered "mangy varmints infesting the land" and represented by the first Westerner elected president, Andrew Jackson. Isenberg examines some surprising sources of these early stereotypes of white trash, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), in which the author "described poor whites as a degenerate class, prone to crime, immorality, and ignorance." From the eugenics movement to the rise of the proud redneck, Isenberg portrays a very real and significant history of class privilege in the United States. A riveting thesis supported by staggering research. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Clinton's embarrassing second term didn't seem to provide lessons, insofar as the Republicans plunged ahead with their own (effectively) white trash candidate in 2008, Alaska governor Sarah Palin. The devastatingly direct Frank Rich of the New York Times referred to the Republican ticket as "Palin and McCain's Shotgun Marriage." Did the venerable John McCain of Arizona, ordinarily a savvy politician, have a lapse in judgment here? Slate produced an online video of Palin's hometown of Wasilla, painting it as a forgettable wasteland, a place "to get gas and pee" before getting back on the road. Wasilla was elsewhere described as the "punch line for most redneck jokes told in Anchorage." Erica Jong wrote in the Huffington Post, "White trash America certainly has allure for voters," which explains the photoshopped image of Palin that appeared on the Internet days after her nomination. In a stars-and-stripes bikini, holding an assault rifle and wearing her signature black-rimmed glasses, Palin was one-half hockey mom and one-half hot militia babe.   News of the pregnancy of Palin's teenage daughter Bristol led to a shotgun engagement to Levi Johnston, which was arranged in time for the Republican National Convention. Us Weekly featured Palin on the cover, with the provocative title, "Babies, Lies, and Scandal." Maureen Dowd compared Palin to Eliza Doolittle of My Fair Lady fame, in getting prepped for her first off-script television interview. Could there be any more direct allusion to her questionable class origins? The Palin melodrama led one journalist to associate the Alaska clan with the plot of a Lifetime television feature. The joke was proven true to life two years later, when the backwoods candidate gave up her gig as governor and starred in her own reality TV show, titled Sarah Palin's Alaska .   Palin's candidacy was a remarkable event on all accounts. She was only the second female of any kind and the first female redneck to appear on a presidential ticket. John McCain's advisers admitted that she had been selected purely for image purposes, and they joined the chorus trashing the flawed candidate after Obama's historic victory. Leaks triggered a media firestorm over Palin's wardrobe expense account. An angry aide categorized the Palins' shopping spree as "Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast."   The Alaskan made an easy and attractive target. Journalists were flabbergasted when she showed no shame in displaying astounding lapses in knowledge. Her bungled interview with NBC host Katie Couric represented more than gotcha journalism: Palin didn't just misconstrue facts; she came across as a woman who was unable to articulate a single complex idea. (The old cracker slur as "idle-headed" seemed to fit.) But neither did Andrew Jackson run as an "idea man" in an earlier century, and it was his style of backcountry hubris that McCain's staffers had been hoping to revive. Shooting wolves from a small plane, bragging about her love of moose meat, "Sarah from Alaska" positioned herself as a regular Annie Oakley on the campaign trail.   It was not enough to rescue her from the mainstream (what she self-protectively called "lamestream") media. Sarah Palin did not have a self-made woman's résumé. She could not offset the "white trash" label as the Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton could. She had attended six unremarkable colleges. She had no military experience (à la navy veteran Jimmy Carter), though she did send one son off to Iraq. Writing in the New Yorker, Sam Tanenhaus was struck by Palin's self-satisfied manner: "the certitude of being herself, in whatever unfinished condition, will always be good enough."   Maureen Dowd quipped that Palin was a "country-music queen without the music." She lacked the self-deprecating humor of Dolly Parton--not to mention the natural talent. The real conundrum was why, even more than how, she was chosen: the white trash Barbie was at once visually appealing and disruptive, and she came from a state whose motto on license plates read, "The Last Frontier." The job was to package the roguish side of Palin alongside a comfortable, conventional female script. In the hit country single "Redneck Woman" (2004), Gretchen Wilson rejected Barbie as an unreal middle-class symbol--candidate Palin's wardrobe bingeing was her Barbie moment.   Her Eliza Doolittle grand entrance came during the televised debate with Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. As the nation waited to see what she looked like and how she performed, Palin came onstage in a little black dress, wearing heels and pearls, and winked at the camera. From the neck down she looked like a Washington socialite, but the wink faintly suggested a gum-chewing waitress at a small-town diner. Embodying these two extremes, the fetching hockey mom image ultimately lost out to what McCain staffers identified as both "hillbilly" and "prima donna."   Sex formed a meaningful subtext throughout Palin's time of national exposure. In terms of trash talk, daughter Bristol Palin's out‑of‑wedlock pregnancy was handled rather differently from Bill Clinton's legendary philandering. Bloggers muddied the waters by spreading rumors about Sarah's Down syndrome child, Trig: "Was he really Bristol's?" they asked. A tale of baby swapping was meant to suggest a new twist on the backwoods immorality of inbred illegitimacy. Recall that it was Bill Clinton's mother, Virginia, whose pedigree most troubled the critics. The legacy held: the rhetoric supporting eugenics (and the sterilization laws that followed) mainly targeted women as tainted breeders.   Sarah Palin's Fargo -esque accent made her tortured speech patterns sound even worse. Former TV talk show host Dick Cavett wrote a scathing satirical piece in which he dubbed her a "serial syntax killer" whose high school English department deserved to be draped in black. He wanted to know how her swooning fans, who adored her for being a "mom like me," or were impressed to see her shooting wolves, could explain how any of those traits would help her to govern.   We had been down this road before as citizens and voters. "Honest Abe" Lincoln was called an ape, a mudsill, and Kentucky white trash. Andrew Jackson was a rude, ill-tempered cracker. (And like Palin, his grammar was nothing to brag about.) The question loomed: At what point does commonness cease to be an asset, as a viable form of populism, and become a liability for a political actor? And should anyone be shocked when voters are swept up in an "almost Elvis-sized following," as Cavett said Palin's were? When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there's always a chance that the dancing bear will win. Excerpted from White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.