White Trash E-Book

Nancy Isenberg

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 999

Beschreibung

The New York Times Bestseller A ground-breaking history of the class system in America, which challenges popular myths about equality in the land of opportunity. In this landmark book, Nancy Isenberg argues that the voters who boosted Trump all the way to the White House have been a permanent part of the American fabric, and reveals how the wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlements to today's hillbillies. 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 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 Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society; they are now offered up as entertainment in reality TV shows, and the label is applied to celebrities ranging from Dolly Parton to Bill Clinton. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the centre of major political debates over the character of the American identity. 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 - and forces a nation to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class.

Leseprobe

“Fascinating and unsettling . . . traces the long-standing codependency between America’s wealthy elites and the white underclass who have been a source of cheap labor since the founding of our country . . . [a] meticulously researched survey of the class system in America.”

—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“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

“Formidable and truth-dealing . . . an eloquent volume that is more discomforting and more necessary than a semitrailer filled with new biographies of the founding fathers and the most beloved presidents.”

—The New York Times

“[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

“Engaging . . . After reading this book you will never think of a trailer park the same way again.”

—Providence Journal

“Written with the grace of a superb novel and the forensic fervor of our finest historians, White Trash pokes and prods in the nooks and crannies of the American psyche, and travels the backroads and backwaters of our national self-image, in search of how class has been made and reshaped over the decades. This is breathtaking social history and dazzling cultural analysis at its best.”

—Michael Eric Dyson, author of Tears We Cannot Stop and The Black Presidency

“An eloquent synthesis of the country’s history of class stratification, one that questions whether the United States is indeed a place where all are created equal. White Trash powerfully unites four centuries of history—economic, political, cultural, and pseudoscientific—to show how thoroughly the notion of class is woven into the national fabric.”

—The Boston Globe

“With her strong academic background and accessible voice, Isenberg takes pains to reveal classism’s deep-seated roots.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“A dizzying, dazzling four-hundred-year-long tour of American history from Pocahontas to Sarah Palin, seen from a vantage point that students of American history occupy all too rarely: that of the disposable citizens whose very presence disrupts what Isenberg calls our ‘national hagiography.’”

—The New Republic

“A book that strikes blow after blow against our foundational myth of equality and boundless opportunity for he (and, much later, she) who would seize it . . . [Isenberg’s] erudition is stunning.”

—The Dallas Morning News

“A carefully researched indictment of a particularly American species of hypocrisy, and it’s deeply relevant to the pathologies of contemporary America.”

—The Christian Science Monitor

“White Trash is certain to be controversial. No debate, however, can minimize the rigor of Isenberg’s research, the clarity of her prose, or her courage in exploring this fraught subject. Hers is a book that should forever change the way we think and talk about class, which Isenberg suggests is the rotting stage upon which American democracy will either stand or fall.”

—The American Scholar

“White Trash provides an honest (and therefore important) look at four centuries of misrepresentation and exploitation—complete with the conventional wisdom, pseudoscience, and armchair anthropology that sustains it.”

—Rural American, In These Times

“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.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“From John Locke’s plans for the colonies to twentieth-century eugenics, from the rise of Andrew Jackson to the modern Republican party, White Trash will change the way we think about our past and present.”

—T. J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Custer’s Trials

“To any and all who want to understand, and understand deeply, our present age of brutal inequality, here is a timely and essential book.”

—Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship: A Human History

“In White Trash, Nancy Isenberg reveals a dark and tangled American secret at the core of our history: the pervasive persistence of white poverty. She deftly explores the interplay of mockery and denial in treatments, historical and fictional, of hardships and limits in a supposed land of equal and abundant opportunity. Drawing upon popular media as well as historical sources, from past and present, she exposes harsh realities long kept hidden in plain sight.”

—Alan Taylor, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Colonies and The Internal Enemy

WHITE TRASH

BY NANCY ISENBERG

Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America

BY NANCY ISENBERG WITH ANDREW BURSTEIN

Madison and Jefferson

NANCY ISENBERG

WHITE TRASH

The 400- Year Untold History of Class in America

Published by arrangement with Viking,an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

This paperback edition published in 2017.First published in Great Britain in hardback in 2017 byAtlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Nancy Isenberg, 2016

The moral right of Nancy Isenberg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78649-298-2

E-book ISBN: 978-1-78649-299-9

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78649-300-2

Designed by Francesca Belanger

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

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WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

In memory of Gerda Lerner and Paul Boyer

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

Fables We Forget By

Part I: To Begin the World Anew

CHAPTER ONE

Taking Out the Trash:

Waste People in the New World

CHAPTER TWO

John Locke’s Lubberland:

The Settlements of Carolina and Georgia

CHAPTER THREE

Benjamin Franklin’s American Breed:

The Demographics of Mediocrity

CHAPTER FOUR

Thomas Jefferson’s Rubbish:

A Curious Topography of Class

CHAPTER FIVE

Andrew Jackson’s Cracker Country:

The Squatter as Common Man

Part II: Degeneration of the American Breed

CHAPTER SIX

Pedigree and Poor White Trash:

Bad Blood, Half-Breeds, and Clay-Eaters

CHAPTER SEVEN

Cowards, Poltroons, and Mudsills:

Civil War as Class Warfare

CHAPTER EIGHT

Thoroughbreds and Scalawags:

Bloodlines and Bastard Stock in the Age of Eugenics

CHAPTER NINE

Forgotten Men and Poor Folk:

Downward Mobility and the Great Depression

CHAPTER TEN

The Cult of the Country Boy:

Elvis Presley, Andy Griffith, and LBJ’s Great Society

Part III: The White Trash Makeover

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Redneck Roots:

Deliverance, Billy Beer, and Tammy Faye

CHAPTER TWELVE

Outing Rednecks:

Slumming, Slick Willie, and Sarah Palin

EPILOGUE

America’s Strange Breed:

The Long Legacy of White Trash

NOTES

INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

  54  The Mapp of Lubberland or the Ile of Lazye (ca. 1670), British Print, #1953.0411.69AN48846001, The British Museum, London, England

121  Encounter Between a Corncracker and an Eelskin, from Davy Crockett’s Almanack of 1837, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts

130  “Old Sug,” from John Robb’s Streaks of Squatter Life (1847), American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts

168  “The Bad Bird and the Mudsill,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 21, 1863

196  Chart used at a fair in Kansas promoting fitter families and eugenic marriages (ca. 1929), Scrapbook, American Eugenic Society Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

199  The 10,000 Hookworm Family, 201 H Alabama, Hookworm, Box 42, Folder 1044, #1107, 1913, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York

199  Photograph of Henry McLean, age twenty-three, infected with hookworm, and W. C. Riddich, age twenty-one, not infected, 236 H North Carolina, Box 53, Folder 1269, #236 Vashti Alexander County, North Carolina, May 29, 1913, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York

202  Carrie Buck and her mother, Emma (1924), Arthur Estabrook Collection, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University of Albany Libraries, Albany, New York

212  Eroded land on tenant’s farm, Walker County, Alabama (Arthur Rothstein, 1937), LC-USF34-025121, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC

222  Homestead, Penderlea, North Carolina (1936), LC-USF33-000717-M2, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC

234  The Beverly Hillbillies as American Gothic on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, February 2, 1963

243  Trailer trash as squatters in Winkelman, Arizona (1950), Photograph Collection of the History and Archives Division of the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records, Phoenix, Arizona

248  Will Counts’s photograph of Elizabeth Ann Eckford and Hazel Bryan in Little Rock, Arkansas, September 4, 1957, Will Counts Collection, Indiana University Archives

250  Taylor Thornberry, Life magazine, September 23, 1957, Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

262  LBJ visiting Appalachian families for the Tour on Poverty (1963), #215-23-64, Inez Kentucky, LBJ Library Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas

288  Dolly Parton stand-up poster from Nashville, Tennessee, featured in Roy Blount Jr., “Country’s Angels,” Esquire, March 1977

289  Tammy Faye Bakker on the cover of her album Don’t Give Up (1985)

300  Bill Maxwell’s article “Seen as ‘White Trash’: Maybe Some Hate Clinton Because He’s Too Southern,” Wilmington, North Carolina, Star-News, June 19, 1994

305  Caricature of Sarah Palin in overalls by Steve Brodner in The New Yorker, December 7, 2009

307  Ritz Brothers from the Hollywood movie Kentucky Moonshine (1938) and the cast of A&E’s reality TV show Duck Dynasty (2015)

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

This book was originally published in the middle of the contentious 2016 presidential election season. By describing historical patterns, it had the effect of bringing some clarity to the otherwise feverish rhetorical muddle. And yet, in the aftermath of the election, conventional wisdom did little to improve upon the preelection confusion. As ABC reported, Donald Trump’s shocking electoral success represented the “triumph of class over identity.” It made no sense otherwise to analysts caught short. If the undeniable factors of racism and misogyny did not tilt the balance at the polls, then “the surging return of class in politics” must have. Searching for explanations is natural, but ABC did as punditry is wont to do and produced a false dichotomy in its effort to find a simple answer. The truth is, it’s not one or the other: class and identity politics operate in tandem.1

While it is true that the major candidates who competed in 2016 all fell back on some form of a class-conscious vocabulary in advancing their positions, it cannot be said that identity politics disappeared in the face of “surging” class issues. From the outset of the Democratic primary process, while Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont was calling for a “class revolution,” he drew in enormous numbers of millennials across the social spectrum who felt the weight of college loans. Despite Sanders’s claims that his opponent was asking women to vote for her on the basis of her gender alone, front-runner Hillary Clinton directed her appeal to voters on economic issues common to “all working families.” From early on in the primary, she focused alike on the pocketbook issue of child care and the racial and class roots of inner-city violence.2

Yet both the Democratic contenders had to make themselves likeable and familiar. Sanders looked like a rumpled professor and sounded like a vintage sixties radical, speaking truth to power. No wonder students liked him. Clinton drew in some of the younger Lean In audience, and also won over older African American women because of her proven loyalty to the black community. Emotional bonds dominate the imagined “conversation” between candidate and voter, with little overt reference to class.3

And yet, in the immediate analytic (or pundit-driven) aftermath, it was class all the way. Going against the grain, in a widely cited op-ed, Columbia University professor Mark Lilla wrote in the New York Times just after the election that it was not class at all that lay at the root of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump. He blamed her defeat on a Left-friendly version of identity politics. Trump’s rise was not about class-inflected racism or “whitelash,” he insisted, but served instead to expose liberals’ obsessive need to grant anyone who wanted it membership in a disadvantaged group: black, gay, female, and others. He argued that the Democrats, by their reductionist tendency, had caused “white, rural, religious Americans” to see themselves as ignored, even threatened. The liberal agenda was fueling a hostility toward political correctness; therefore, if the Democratic Party wished to do better, it would have to recover a “pre-identity” politics and reemphasize Americans’ shared values.4 Once again, it was a narrowly defined view of voting, and of identity.

Owing to Trump’s eccentricities, blaming Clinton was inevitable. But the flaws in Professor Lilla’s logic run deeper. His assumption that there was a time when democratic politics was “pre-identity” reflects the larger problem of many respected commentators: attachment to an idealized conception of American democracy. American party politics has exploited the rhetoric of identity at least as far back as Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson. Given the resilience of the white trash slur, rural working-class whites hardly needed liberal lingo to feel alienated.

Illogically, Lilla uses Bill Clinton’s candidacy as one of his examples of identity-free politics. Yet as I detail in these pages, Clinton was a poster child of self-marketing. At the time, Republicans engaged in an unrelenting campaign to challenge Clinton’s legitimacy as president, making every effort to label him a southern bumpkin. In response, Clinton cleverly refashioned himself as the “Arkansas Elvis” and admitted, at times, to being a beer-drinking “Bubba.” He played “Heartbreak Hotel” on the saxophone and posed with a mule on the campaign trail. For the poor white kid from Hope, Clinton’s public image conjured nostalgia for the 1950s Elvis. No one was more skilled than the “comeback kid” in constructing an identity for himself that bridged North and South and in repackaging his personality so as to make him acceptable to working-class white men. The Yale liberal wore blue suede shoes.

If a serious scholar such as Lilla could get Bill Clinton wrong, it’s no surprise that Trump would succeed in confounding so many smart people, too. Journalists throughout 2016 scrambled to figure out what the attraction was to this loud, endlessly self-promoting New Yorker. They were sure it was some brand-new phenomenon born of reality TV and social media. But conventional wisdom was again wrong to see the 2016 election as a break from the past. Like many before him, Trump had tapped into a rich vein of identity politics: the embrace of the common man, the working stiff, the forgotten rural American.

American democracy’s quirky past haunted the Trump campaign. He was not the first cranky businessman to run for high office, even in recent memory. Ross Perot was, capturing 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992. Nor was Trump the first millionaire mogul with Hollywood ties to seek the presidency. That was William Randolph Hearst, a century ago. And he certainly can’t claim to be the first outsider who promised to clean up Washington and embody the hopes and dreams (and fears) of the common man. That honor belongs to Andrew Jackson. As critically, he was not the first politician to question the pedigree of a sitting president either. James Vardaman did that in spades, when he insulted President Theodore Roosevelt. Trump’s rhetorical appeal to the “silent majority” was stolen from Richard Nixon. Sarah Palin paved the way for him as an earlier version of a Republican reality TV populist. Trump’s favorite slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was, of course, Ronald Reagan’s first.

The argument of this book is that America’s class history is a more complicated story than we’ve previously considered. The past informs the present. Presidential candidates are not masters of their own destiny; rather, they are often a patchwork of rhetorical scripts, familiar gestures, political styles inherited from their predecessors, and whatever else they happen to borrow from the grab bag of popular culture.

Critics lament that our twenty-four-hour news cycle turned the 2016 election into a horse race or a sideshow, and they’re right. It was treated as a kind of sporting event. But democratic politicians have always had to lure in voters. In the early nineteenth century, southern backcountry voters came for the free food, the fistfights, and such rowdy forms of entertainment as the “gander pull.” In this indelicate contest, two men on horseback competed for the honor of yanking off the head of a goose. As in the “Squatter’s Tale” about “Old Sug,” men at the polls expected to get a serving of whiskey and brown sugar as they listened to long-winded speeches. It is in the nature of democratic politics for office seekers to appeal with little subtlety to the tastes of the electorate. In the early twentieth century, in his run for governor and the U.S. Senate, Jeff Davis of Arkansas gained the favor of his working-class audiences by ripping off his collar and rolling up his sleeves. He intentionally imitated the uncouth, ungrammatical speech of the lower classes. Even Lyndon Johnson had to canvass in Texas for his Senate seat with a traveling band. Governor “Big Jim” Folsom of Alabama strutted across the stage barefoot.5

Trump’s antics mirror this long tradition. One of his campaign managers, Paul Manafort, admitted at one point that Trump was simply “projecting an image.” Who’s surprised? Americans have a taste for a “democracy of manners,” which is different from real democracy. Voters accept huge disparities in wealth, while expecting their elected leaders to appear to be no different from the rest of us. By talking tough, by boasting that he’d love to throw a punch at a protester, candidate Trump pretended he was stepping down from his opulent Manhattan penthouse to commingle with the unwashed masses. Wearing his not-so-classy bright red Bubba cap, and crooning at one rally, “I love the poorly educated,” he built upon a recognizable strain of American populism.6

Campaigns have long relied on shallow ploys and vicious rhetoric. In the first decade of the twentieth century, William Randolph Hearst’s campaign strategist, Arthur Brisbane, said: “The American people, like all people, are interested in PERSONALITY.” Even then they knew. The earlier billionaire (worth seven times what Forbes says Trump is worth; three times what Trump says Trump is worth) was a more credible populist. He was a staunch union supporter who said: “Wide and equitable distribution of wealth is essential to a nation’s prosperous growth and intellectual development. And that distribution is brought about by the labor union more than any other agency of our civilization.” Yes, he said that while running for president in 1904. Politicians have learned to appeal to (and exploit!) the class discontents of the ordinary voter. An astute observer wrote in 1924 that American voters preferred to “cherish the unrealities they have absorbed” based upon “the primal instinct to defeat the side they hate or fear.” It is just as true today. To his supporters, Trump’s tactlessness and personal vindictiveness scored points, while his lack of policy understanding was overlooked. His fans reveled in his promise to “stick it” to “Crooked Hillary,” and her imagined core base of Washington insiders and too-smart-for-their-own-good Ivy League professionals.7

Many Trump supporters said they were drawn to him because he “speaks his mind,” and voiced a “raw honesty.” As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat concluded early on, Trump was the anti-candidate, totally unpredictable. He wasn’t just playing a part but was refusing to be anything like a scripted politician. The nasty nicknaming of his opponents (“Low-Energy Jeb,” “Little Marco”) was one-half schoolyard bully bravado and one-half public relations branding. Yet his most consistent pitch was to speak for the “forgotten Americans,” those whose class identity and Middle-America sensibilities put them at odds with all politically correct liberals. His utter lack of civility made him the voice of the non-elite outsider.8

That is where the Sarah Palin model came in. The half-term Alaska governor was the ultimate outsider. She was selected as the GOP’s 2008 vice presidential nominee because John McCain’s camp bought into the conceit of reality TV, that anyone could be turned into a viable candidate if given the right makeover. She both intrigued and flabbergasted, whether she was pictured shooting caribou from a helicopter or tripping over standard syntax in her Fargoesque accent. Her appeal was the opposite of Barack Obama’s: whereas she was associated with the rural backwater of Wasilla, he was a hip, savvy Chicagoan.9

Trump seemed to want it both ways—a man of means and glamour and a man of the people; on the first front, though, he was a most ironic example of urban sophistication. The New Yorker bragged about his Wharton MBA degree, but he sounded like a working stiff from Queens. He loved to describe himself as classy, but his outlandish way of showing off his wealth put him squarely in the camp of the nouveau riche. He ignored his inherited wealth and status and proclaimed himself a self-made millionaire. His trophy wives, his gold-accented Louis XIV furniture, and his passion for seeing his name plastered on anything and everything undermined any effort to project the highbrow appeal of old money or the intellectualism of Ivy League graduates. His bragging ways first led him into TV camp as an occasional player in WrestleMania, before going on to star in The Apprentice. None of this activity (or its contradictions) bothered his working-class voters. Just the opposite: it forged a bond. Every time he spoke, he rejected PC etiquette. He was “one of them.”10

This hurling of insults is nineteenth-century political theater revivified. Trump’s tweeting frenzy resembled nothing so much as Andrew Jackson responding to critics by invoking the code duello. Revenge was the Jacksonian recourse in an era when perceived slights led to brawls and shoot-outs. In the fall of 2016, anticipating defeat at the polls, Trump asserted that the election had already been “rigged.” In 1825, Jacksonians similarly attributed their hero’s loss to a “Corrupt Bargain,” because Congress refused to ratify popular opinion. Those who lionized Jackson adored him for his unpolished backcountry manner and uncompromising positions. He has been referred to as a “democratic autocrat.” For the next century or more, he was democracy incarnate.11

That other Trump-like politician who leaps from the past, Mississippian James Vardaman, was known in the first decade of the twentieth century as “The White Chief.” He, too, was the darling of angry lower-class whites, combining a cruel racist bent with a proclivity for trash-talking. Readers are reminded that when Theodore Roosevelt dined with African American leader Booker T. Washington in the White House, Vardaman went ballistic. Though Roosevelt was the scion of the proud and wealthy New York family going back to the colonial Dutch settlers, Vardaman used his own brand of birtherism to smear the president’s pedigree. His unfiltered reaction was to allude to “Old Lady Roosevelt” having been frightened by a dog during her pregnancy; in a moment of alchemy, “qualities of the male pup” were transferred to the embryo, which was all that explained Roosevelt’s embrace of a black man. It is worth adding that Vardaman was equally notable for his distinctive dark locks as for his wicked tongue. Democracy, no matter how dirty, belonged to the people, he held, and the people had the right to broadcast whatever they were feeling. The twenty-first-century Vardaman speaks without self-censoring when he feels cornered by a disabled journalist or a blonde Fox News host with “blood coming out of her whatever.”12

In spite of the founders’ noble dream of an informed public, the American political landscape has never been able to sustain itself as a place for sound deliberation. Nor does American democracy consistently confer power to a calm problem solver. Outrageous language spoken by grandiose public men of all shapes and sizes and educational backgrounds, in and out of the halls of government, prefigured the passion-filled diatribes of the Civil War era. Then as now, the national media stoked the fires of popular discontent. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, print culture was huge, and newspapers across the country carried complete transcripts of bombastic speeches. One of the best-known practitioners of the democratic art of overstatement was Virginia planter-politician John Randolph of Roanoke, who often drowned out the practiced logic of his colleagues with oratorical detours drenched in comic indecision. Gawky to look at, this lifelong bachelor was an attack engine, thought clinically mad by many; yet the theatrically generated outrage he churned up drew crowds, and newspaper readers devoured all that he had to say. Appearance was part of Randolph’s shrill charm, as were his mocking faces and rude antics: tall, impossibly thin, with a high, childlike voice, he took slugs from a flask on the floor of Congress; he loved to hear the sound of his own voice. His biographer Henry Adams said of his verbal combativeness, “He could gouge and kick, bite off an ear or a nose, or hit below the waist.” Randolph asserted of his own “unprosperous” life that it was “the fruit of an ungovernable temper.” The states’ rights advocate was elected and reelected repeatedly over the course of decades; President Jackson named him ambassador to Russia. Like his anger-prone patron Jackson or the later Vardaman, John Randolph embodied an element in American democracy that still lives, and evidently thrives, and does not advertise for the founding generation’s sobriety and deliberative spirit.13

What history teaches us about the true character of American democracy is that it cannot be generalized, and it cannot be defined scientifically. One cannot effectively lump voters together into arbitrary blocs based on demographic statistics and have it mean anything: there is no reductionist, easily definable women’s vote, or black or Latino vote, or Evangelical vote, or youth vote. And as White Trash has sought to make clear, the so-called white, working-class vote is an inaccurate designation as well. Class matters, as identity politics matters, but neither is sufficient alone to define categories of voting behavior.

Something else matters that rarely gets talked about: an amorphous, intangible something we might call “embodied appeal.” It is the candidate’s metaphoric identity, not a “true” identity, that citizens are met with in video clips and edited interviews. Whether the person running is a Democrat, a Republican, or an Independent, and coming from a professional background as lawyer, doctor, military officer, or fame-chasing businessman, any individual who runs for national office is compelled to perform a kind of stage act. He or she becomes associated with a pet phrase, a slogan, a staged look, a zinger, a moniker—in short, the candidate exudes an appeal designed to push the emotional buttons of the broadest voter base imaginable. Optics matter. The size of crowds becomes a rallying point. The viability of detailed plans that the problem-solving, would-be legislator or would-be executive has studied, compared, and compiled is never as memorable as the performance dimension of the campaign.

Language rules. It is oft remarked that negative ads predominate because they work on the impressionable minds of voters. This is one of the sadder facts of modern electoral politics, yet the will does not exist to alter the increasingly expensive, all-out attack mode of saturation commercial bombing, in favor of measures that would be more amenable to the calmer vision of the framers of the Constitution who, as it happens, did not even address the prospect of the formation of organized political parties. (The original “Greatest Generation” was not composed of as many geniuses as we’ve been taught.) One of the reasons why the pollsters are often wrong is the widespread failure to account for the ways in which voters are convinced by what they are hearing. Selective belief, preference for one “truth” over another, explains, for instance, how someone can dismiss the vast majority of scientists who see incontrovertible evidence of dangerous trends in climate change. Political choices are hardly rational choices. An unconscious linguistic relationship forms between candidate and voter, and choice metaphors preoccupy a voter’s thoughts.

Presidential elections are battles over worldviews. The symbols that mattered most to Trump voters were about class, but the metaphoric meaning played out in a more expansive rhetoric that divided constituencies by competing markers of identity. The unspoken and spoken themes of the political contest were:

Clinton Democrats

Trump Republicans

Pedigreed Elites

Disinherited

Urban Insider

Rural Outsider

Cosmopolitan

Provincial

Professionals

Working Stiffs

Meritocracy

Hard Work

Faith in Upward Mobility

Fear of Losing Class Status

Both Trump at his inaugural and President Obama in his farewell remarks called for solidarity, but their visions of what constitutes togetherness are completely at odds. President Obama and Hillary Clinton celebrated American exceptionalism, which for them was bound up in education and economic opportunity, cultural diversity, and the promise that “all men are created equal.” Democrats, in general, endorse the liberal ideal of meritocracy, in which talent is rewarded through the acquisition of earned academic credentials. Yet this dream is not possible for all Americans. Only 32.5 percent of Americans today graduate college, which means that the majority does not imagine this path up the social ladder as its ticket to success. Trump, in contrast, would appear to envision solidarity in terms of an “America First” patriotism.14

Back in 2004, campaigning for the Democratic nomination, South Carolina Democrat John Edwards capitalized on a powerful image when he continually hammered the existence of “two Americas.” The same imagery was put to use in 2016 by the nominee of the Republican Party, who painted the country he sought to rule as an economically war-torn wasteland, lacking in the vitality and the productivity that had made it dominant in the past. (In his 2017 inaugural, Trump described the “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of America.”) In this metaphoric construction, recovering greatness meant replenishing the strength of an all-American workforce, returning it to its accustomed (and deserved) position at the top of the food chain. Hardworking breadwinners who had come to see diminishing returns, their pride in performance outstripped by foreign manufacturing, found their candidate. You, the disinherited, have lost ground, he said, and are at a standstill in your lives, because your federal government has allowed this terrible decline to occur. Whereas Senator Edwards had directed his slogan at gross inequality, shining a light on all the poor and underrepresented, Trump courted the predominantly white workforce, whose percentage of the population was evidently in decline; thus, immigrants and refugees became targets—“the usual suspects,” if one goes back to attacks on the Irish, southern Europeans, Chinese, Jews, and others, in past generations.15

The election has opened up festering wounds. The deepest of these exposes how we measure the value of civic virtue and hard work. Many successful Americans believe they have made it on their own and have little patience for the complaints of those left behind. Trump perceived a world of winners and losers, and many of his supporters want to reinforce the old stigmas that separated the productive worker from the idle. They wanted the boundaries between the unemployed and employed to be firmly enforced, not weakened. “Make America Great Again” is another way of saying that hard work is no longer automatically rewarded as a virtue. It tapped the anxieties of all who resented government for handing over the country to supposedly less deserving classes: new immigrants, protesting African Americans, lazy welfare freeloaders, and Obamacare recipients asking for handouts. Angry Trump voters were convinced that these classes (the “takers”) were not playing by the rules (i.e., working their way up the ladder) and that government entitlement programs were allowing some to advance past more deserving (white, native-born) Americans. This was how many came to feel “disinherited.”16

The phenomenon of social and political alienation cannot be easily cured. Even Vice President Joe Biden remarked in 2016 that Democrats had placed too much emphasis on “pedigree.” He meant intellectual pedigree, class pedigree. This simmering resentment made it easier for Trump to widen the cleavage by suggesting that the federal government had been hijacked by the first African American president, who remained illegitimate in the eyes of many in the GOP. Trump had not only dominated headlines by challenging President Obama to produce his birth certificate, but he also, significantly, questioned his Harvard credentials. Racial pedigree was used to undercut intellectual pedigree.17

“Taking our country back,” as the Tea Party harangued after 2010, became a convenient slogan for Trump to use against the Obama administration and its surrogate Hillary Clinton. By 2016, Trump’s “I will bring the jobs back” seemed a winning concept. Distrust of fluid class boundaries made many voters fear competition from below. They lacked faith in the promised social mobility of the meritocratic system. As one Trump supporter from Pennsylvania who attended the inauguration explained as he imagined his son’s future: “Where I’m from, we see kids get engineering degrees and end up working at McDonald’s.” Anecdotal evidence suggested a rigged system and a zero-sum game for success. If there were undeserving winners, there must be losers.18

Trump’s statements, up to and including his inaugural address, may have been short on specific policy prescriptions; but no moment was lost whenever the incoming president saw a chance to promise that he alone could restore the American dream. “We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams.” He repeated the word dream at least four times on January 20, 2017.19

Dreams may make the heart beat faster, but they do not improve social conditions or ensure fairness in the workplace or secure the family farm. So, once again, it is the language deployed by the politician that obscures patterns we have seen before but that strikes voters as new and urgent. This is what professional historians are called on to do: to look backward and uncover what is missing in current popular conceptions. Hopefully, then, this book has achieved its goal of historicizing the plight of the underclass over four centuries. Perhaps, too, it is clearer to more Americans that the rural as well as postindustrial wasteland can no longer be overlooked as a site of meaningful social and political discontent. The prevailing mood among those whose manners have been mocked since colonial times—whether called waste people, mudsills, rednecks, or white trash—should matter to us. They are a factor in American history, because class is as American as it ever was British.

Punditry has tended to reduce the reality of class, which crosses lines of racial and gender identity, and to replace it with an all-encompassing marker of dispossession that exclusively features the once ascendant, now aggrieved “white working-class male.” Such an artificial, monolithic designation of working class reinforces the idea of voting blocs as fixed categories. As a result, politicians are said to appeal to one or another preset group. We need to see beyond.20

We need to look honestly at the real perils of our electoral system in this age of media celebrity and instantaneous communication, especially when compounded lies cease to shock and a cacophony of voices among insistent ideologues compromise constitutional principles and make it harder and harder to know which policies stand the best chance of improving the lives of more citizens. We need to stop thinking that some Americans are the real Americans, the deserving, the talented, the most patriotic and hardworking, while others can be dismissed as less deserving of the American dream.

One thing we can do in the interest of national self-improvement is to further the conversation about the manipulations of class identity by political aspirants, who game the system each time they sell unreal expectations to people whose interests they only pretend to represent. If we do not study ourselves with due attention to disturbing patterns in our history, we will be learning little, and democracy can scarcely claim to be the best form of government.

PREFACE

One of the most memorable films of all time is To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), a classic portrait of the legacy of slavery and racial segregation in the South. It is a film that I have been teaching for over two decades, and is one of President Obama’s favorite movies. Yet when my students watch this film (even if they were exposed to it in high school), they see for the first time that the drama within has not one but two disturbing messages.

One plotline is about the brave, principled lawyer Atticus Finch, who refuses to perpetuate the racial double standard: despite opposition, he agrees to defend an African American, Tom Robinson, on the charge of raping a poor white girl, Mayella Ewell. Though the court finds Robinson guilty, we the viewers know he is innocent. An honorable, hardworking family man, he stands well above the degraded Ewells, his accusers. The shabbily attired Mayella is cowed by her bully of a father, a scrawny man seen in overalls, who is devoid of merit or morality. Bob Ewell demands that the all-white jury of common men take his side, which they do in the end. He insists that they help him avenge his daughter’s honor. Not satisfied when Robinson is killed trying to escape from prison, he attacks Atticus Finch’s two children on Halloween night.

Bob Ewell’s full name is Robert E. Lee Ewell. But he is not an heir of one of the aristocratic families of the Old South. As Harper Lee described them in the novel from which the classic film was adapted, the Ewells were members of the terminally poor, those whose status could not be lifted or debased by any economic fluctuation—not even the Depression. They were human waste. In the author’s words, “No truant officers could keep their numerous offspring in school; no public health officer could free them from congenital defects, various worms, and diseases indigenous to filthy surroundings.” They lived behind the town dump, which they combed every day. Their run-down shack was “once a Negro cabin.” Garbage was strewn everywhere, making the cabin look like the “playhouse of an insane child.” No one in the neighborhood knew how many children lived there: some thought nine, others six. To the town of Maycomb, Alabama, the Ewell children were simply “dirty-faced ones at the windows when anyone passed.”1 The Ewells are unmistakably what southerners (and a lot of other people) called white trash.

Americans today have a narrow and skewed understanding of white trash. One of the most powerful and most familiar symbols of backward attitudes associated with this unfavored group is that captured in newspapers and in television footage of 1957, showing the angry white faces of protest amid school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 2015, tattooed KKK protestors defending the Confederate flag outside the Columbia, South Carolina, statehouse evoked similar feelings, demonstrating the persistence of an embarrassing social phenomenon. The stock of the Food Network’s popular performer Paula Deen, a Georgia native known for her cholesterol-rich recipes, suddenly took a nosedive in 2013, when it was revealed that she used the “N word”; almost overnight, her down-home reputation sank and she was rebranded as a crude, unsophisticated redneck. At the other extreme, television viewers have been treated to such repackaged vaudeville characters as Jefferson Davis “Boss” Hogg in The Dukes of Hazzard (1979–85), which could be seen in reruns until 2015, when it was dropped because of the Confederate flag painted on Bo and Luke Duke’s car, “General Lee.” The very title of this show was a pun on class identity, since the Dukes are poor Georgia mountain folk and moonshiners, yet their name implies English royalty.2

These white trash snapshots offer an incomplete picture of a problem that is actually quite old and regularly goes unrecognized. In their conversations about viral events such as those noted above, 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. In many ways, our class system has hinged on the evolving political rationales used to dismiss or demonize (or occasionally reclaim) those white rural outcasts seemingly incapable of becoming part of the mainstream society.

The Ewells, then, are not bit players in our country’s history. Their history starts in the 1500s, not the 1900s. It derives from British colonial policies dedicated to resettling the poor, decisions that conditioned American notions of class and left a permanent imprint. First known as “waste people,” and later “white trash,” marginalized Americans were stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children—the sense of uplift on which the American dream is predicated. The American solution to poverty and social backwardness was not what we might expect. Well into the twentieth century, expulsion and even sterilization sounded rational to those who wished to reduce the burden of “loser” people on the larger economy.

In Americans’ evolving attitudes toward these unwanted people, perhaps the most dramatic language attached to the mid-nineteenth century, when poor rural whites were categorized as somehow less than white, their yellowish skin and diseased and decrepit children marking them as a strange breed apart. The words “waste” and “trash” are crucial to any understanding of this powerful and enduring vocabulary. Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity.

The poor, the waste, the rubbish, as they are variously labeled, have stood front and center during America’s most formative political contests. During colonial settlement, they were useful pawns as well as rebellious troublemakers, a pattern that persisted amid mass migrations of landless squatters westward across the continent. Southern poor whites figured prominently in the rise of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, and in the atmosphere of distrust that caused bad blood to percolate among the poorer classes within the Confederacy during the Civil War. White trash were dangerous outliers in efforts to rebuild the Union during Reconstruction; and in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when the eugenics movement flourished, they were the class of degenerates targeted for sterilization. On the flip side, poor whites were the beneficiaries of rehabilitative efforts during the New Deal and in LBJ’s “Great Society.”

At all times, white trash remind us of one of the American nation’s uncomfortable truths: the poor are always with us. A preoccupation with penalizing poor whites reveals an uneasy tension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises—the dream of upward mobility—and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unobtainable. Of course, the intersection of race and class remains an undeniable part of the overall story.

The study presented here reveals a complicated legacy. It’s not just a question of labeling the bottom at any given time. Rationalizing economic inequality has been an unconscious part of the national credo; poverty has been naturalized, often seen as something beyond human control. By this measure, poor whites had to be classified as a distinct breed. In other words, breeding was not about the cultivation of social manners or skills, but something far more sinister: an imposed inheritance. The language of class that America embraced played off English attitudes toward vagrancy, and marked a transatlantic fixation with animal husbandry, demography, and pedigree. The poor were not only described as waste, but as inferior animal stocks too.

Over the years, populist themes have emerged alongside more familiar derogatory images, but never with enough force to diminish the hostility projected onto impoverished rural whites. We have seen in recent decades the rise of tribal passions through the rediscovery of “redneck roots,” a proud movement that coursed through the 1980s and 1990s. More than a reaction to progressive changes in race relations, this shift was spurred on by a larger fascination with identity politics. Roots implied that class took on the traits (and allure) of an ethnic heritage, which in turn reflected the modern desire to measure class as merely a cultural phenomenon. But as evidenced in the popularity of the “reality TV” shows Duck Dynasty and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo in recent years, white trash in the twenty-first century remains fraught with the older baggage of stereotypes of the hopelessly ill bred.

A host of well-known and lesser-known figures contributed to the long saga of America’s embattled lowly breed. These include Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Davy Crockett, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jefferson Davis, Andrew Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Theodore Roosevelt, Erskine Caldwell, James Agee, Elvis Presley, Lyndon Baines Johnson, James Dickey, Billy Carter, Dolly Parton, William Jefferson Clinton, and Sarah Palin, to name a few. Examining their ideas, shifting public images, and self-images helps us to make greater sense of the curious and complicated story of American class identity.

This book tells many stories, then. One is the importance of America’s rural past. Another, and arguably the most important, is the one we as a people have trouble embracing: the pervasiveness of a class hierarchy in the United States. It begins and ends with the concepts of land and property ownership: class identity and the material and metaphoric meaning of land are closely connected. For much of American history, the worst classes were seen as extrusions of the worst land: scrubby, barren, and swampy wasteland. Home ownership remains today the measure of social mobility.

My interest in this topic goes back to graduate school, where I was fortunate to have worked with two remarkable scholars whose approach to history shaped my professional career in significant ways. Gerda Lerner, my doctoral dissertation adviser, had a keen passion for demystifying ideologies, and she instilled in me a wariness for the limits of conventional wisdom. Paul Boyer was an intellectual historian with an amazing range, who wrote with subtlety and grace about Puritan New England, nineteenth-century moral reformers, and twentieth-century religious fundamentalists. The border town of San Benito, Texas, figures into my interest in this topic as well. It was my mother’s birthplace. Her father, John MacDougall, was a modern-day colonist, bringing settlers from Canada to farm the land.

Friends and colleagues have helped this book along in crucial ways. I wish to thank those who read chapters, gave suggestions, or sent along sources: Chris Tomlins, Alexis McCrossen, Liz Varon, Matt Dennis, Lizzie Reis, Amy Greenberg, and my LSU colleague Aaron Sheehan-Dean. Lisa Francavilla, managing editor of The Papers of Jefferson: Retirement Series, Charlottesville, Virginia, called my attention to a valuable letter; Charles Roberts graciously shared with me a crucial newspaper article on the resettlement community of Palmerdale, Alabama. My Viking editor, Wendy Wolf, with roots in New Orleans, was instrumental in tightening the argument and policing the prose. Wendy put an extraordinary amount of time, skill, and care into the manuscript; her thoughtful editing has taken a complex history and made it far more reader friendly, proving that academic rigor does not have to limit accessibility. Most of all, I have to thank Andy Burstein, my dearest confidant and fellow historian, whose critical eye made this a much better book.

WHITE TRASH

INTRODUCTION

Fables We Forget By

We know what class is. Or think we do: economic stratification created by wealth and privilege. The problem is that popular American history is most commonly told—dramatized—without much reference to the existence of social classes. It is as though in separating from Great Britain, the United States somehow magically escaped the bonds of class and derived a higher consciousness of enriched possibility. After all, the U.S. Senate is not the House of Lords. Schoolbooks teach the national narrative along the lines of “how land and liberty were won” or “how ordinary folks seized opportunity.” The hallowed American dream is the gold standard by which politicians and voters alike are meant to measure quality of life as each generation pursues its own definition of happiness unfettered by the restraints of birth (who your parents are) or station (the position you start out from in the class system).

Our cherished myths are at once bolstering and debilitating. “All men are created equal” was successfully employed as a motto to define the promise of America’s open spaces and a united people’s moral self-regard in distinguishing themselves from a host of hopeless societies abroad. The idea of America was presented by its chief promoters with great panache, a vision of how a modern republic might prove itself revolutionary in terms of social mobility in a world dominated by monarchy and fixed aristocracy.

All that is bolstering. However, the reality on the ground was and is considerably different. In the most literal terms, as we shall see, 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. After settlement, colonial outposts exploited their unfree laborers (indentured servants, slaves, and children) and saw such expendable classes as human waste. The poor, the waste, did not disappear, and by the early eighteenth century they were seen as a permanent breed. This way of classifying human failure took hold in the United States. Every era in the continent’s vaunted developmental story had its own taxonomy of waste people—unwanted and unsalvageable. Each era had its own means of distancing its version of white trash from the mainstream ideal.

By thinking of the lower classes as incurable, irreparable “breeds,” this study reframes the relationship of race and class. Class had its own singular and powerful dynamic, apart from its intersection with race. It starts with the rich and potent meaning that came with the different names given the American underclass. Long before they were today’s “trailer trash” and “rednecks,” they were called “lubbers” and “rubbish” and “clay-eaters” and “crackers”—and that’s just scratching the surface.

Lest the reader misconstrue the book’s purpose, I want to make the point unambiguously: by reevaluating the American historical experience in class terms, I expose what is too often ignored about American identity. But I’m not just pointing out what we’ve gotten wrong about the past; I also want to make it possible to better appreciate the gnawing contradictions still present in modern American society.

How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or indeed accommodate, its persistently marginalized people? Twenty-first-century Americans need to confront this enduring conundrum. Let us recognize the existence of our underclass. It has been with us since the first European settlers arrived on these shores. It is not an insignificant part of the vast national demographic today. The puzzle of how white trash embodied this tension is one of the key questions the book presumes to answer.

America’s class language and thinking began with the forceful imprint left by English colonization. The generations of the 1500s and 1600s that first envisioned the broad-scale English exploitation of America’s natural environment employed a vocabulary that was a mix of purposeful description and raw imagery. They did not indulge in pretty talk. The idea of settlement had to be sold to wary investors; the planting of New World American colonies had to serve Old World purposes. In grand fashion, promoters imagined America not as an Eden of opportunity but as a giant rubbish heap that could be transformed into productive terrain. Expendable people—waste people—would be unloaded from England; their labor would germinate a distant wasteland. Harsh as it sounds, the idle poor, dregs of society, were to be sent thither simply to throw down manure and die in a vacuous muck. Before it became that fabled “City upon a Hill,” America was in the eyes of sixteenth-century adventurers a foul, weedy wilderness—a “sinke hole” suited to ill-bred commoners. Dark images of the New World accompanied more seductive ones. When early English promoters portrayed North America as a rich and fertile landscape, they grossly and perhaps knowingly exaggerated. Most were describing a land they never had seen, of course. Wary investors and state officials had to be convinced to take the plunge into a risky overseas venture. But most important, it was a place into which they could export their own marginalized people.

The idea of America as “the world’s best hope” came much later. Historic memory has camouflaged the less noble origins of “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” We all know what imagery springs to mind when patriots of our day seek confirmation that their country is and was always an “exceptional” place: modest Pilgrims taught to plant by generous Indians; Virginia Cavaliers entertaining guests at their refined estates along the James River. Because of how history is taught, Americans tend to associate Plymouth and Jamestown with cooperation rather than class division.

And it gets ever more misty-eyed from there, because disorder and discord serve no positive purpose in burgeoning national pride. Class is the most outstanding, if routinely overlooked, element in presuppositions about early settlement. Even now, the notion of a broad and supple middle class functions as a mighty balm, a smoke screen. We cling to the comfort of the middle class, forgetting that there can’t be a middle class without a lower. It is only occasionally shaken up, as when the Occupy Wall Street movement of recent years shone an embarrassing light on the financial sector and the grotesque separation between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. And then the media giants find new crises and the nation’s inherited disregard for class reboots, as the subject recedes into the background again.

An imaginary classless (or class-free) American past is the America that Charles Murray has conjured in his book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (2012). For Murray, an authority in the minds of many, the large and fluid society of 1963 was held together by the shared experiences of the nuclear family. When they watched The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, average Americans believed they were seeing their lives on the small screen.1

Nothing could be further from the truth. Even in its innocent youth, television caricatured people by class types. One only need consider a few of the other popular shows of those halcyon years to prove the point: Petticoat Junction (1963), which chronicled rural life at the Shady Rest Hotel and contrasted a simpler people with their savvier city relations; The Farmer’s Daughter (1963), featuring a Swedish American maid from the farm who goes to work for a U.S. congressman; Green Acres (1965), where Arnold the pig is the smartest resident of the hick town of Hooterville; and, finally, that classic satire of social mobility, The Beverly Hillbillies (1962), whose mountain-bred oil millionaires seem like evolutionary throwbacks in the eyes of city folk. And lest we forget, Ozzie and Harriet began its long run at the same time as The Honeymooners, a brilliant send-up of a bus driver, a sewer worker, and their poor working-class wives. Everyone who tuned in understood perfectly well that Ozzie and Harriet’s world bore no resemblance to Ralph and Alice Kramden’s. Parody was one way Americans safely digested their class politics.

Selective memory allows us to romanticize a golden age that functions as a timeless talisman of American identity. For Charles Murray, who ignores the country’s long history, the golden age is 1963, when the essence of the American creed was somehow captured in a Gallup poll in which respondents refused to self-identify as either poor or rich: approximately half said that they were working class, while the other half perceived themselves as middle class. As if a single statistic could possibly tell a comprehensive story, the social scientist writes, “Those refusals reflected a national conceit that had prevailed from the beginning of the nation: America didn’t have classes, or, to the extent that it did, Americans should act as if we didn’t” (emphasis added). Murray’s fable of class denial can only exist by erasing a wealth of historical evidence that proves otherwise. The problem is, the evidence has never been effectively laid out, allowing gross misrepresentations to stand.2

By gaining first a better understanding of the colonial context and, next, charting the steps by which modern definitions of class were established, we will be able to see how ideas and ideals combined over time. By acknowledging the ongoing influence of older English definitions of poverty and class, we will come to recognize that class identity was apparent in America—profoundly so—long before George Gallup saw it as a creature of public opinion; indeed, class resonated long before waves of immigrants swept ashore in the nineteenth century and an awkward, often heated process of acculturation ensued. Above all, we must stop declaring what is patently untrue, that Americans, through some rare good fortune, escaped the burden of class that prevailed in the mother country of England. Far more than we choose to acknowledge, our relentless class system evolved out of recurring agrarian notions regarding the character and potential of the land, the value of labor, and critical concepts of breeding. Embarrassing lower-class populations have always been numerous, and have always been seen on the North American continent as waste people.

Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting. We have to begin, then, with the first refusal to face reality: most colonizing schemes that took root in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century British America were built on privilege and subordination, not any kind of proto-democracy. The generation of 1776 certainly underplayed that fact. And all subsequent generations took their cue from the nation’s founders.

A past that relies exclusively on the storied Pilgrims, or the sainted generation of 1776, shortchanges us in more ways than one. We miss a crucial historical competition between northern and southern founding narratives and their distinctive parables minimizing the importance of class. The Declaration of Independence and the federal Constitution, principal founding documents, loom large as proof of national paternity; the six-foot-three-inch Virginian George Washington stands head and shoulders above his countrymen as the figurative “father” of his nation. With Virginia’s claim to an origins story in mind, another founding father, John Adams, heralded the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, as an earlier and stronger model for an American patrician-patriarch. The lesson is easy: then as now, origins are contested territory. What can’t be denied, however, are the class origins of the anointed leaders.3

Beyond the web of stories the founding generation itself wove, our modern beliefs have most to do with the grand mythmakers of the nineteenth century. The inspired historians of that period were nearly all New Englanders; they outpaced all others in shaping the historical narrative, so that the dominant story of origins worked in their favor. That is how we got the primordial Puritan narrative of a sentimental community and a commendable work ethic. Of course, the twin attributes of religious freedom and hard work erase from the record all those settlers who did not live up to these high ideals. The landless, the impoverished, the progenitors of future generations of white trash conveniently disappear from the founding saga.

There were plays and poems, in addition to standard histories, flowing from the pens of Bostonians as they praised the separatists who established the early settlements. As early as 1769, New Englanders began celebrating “Forefathers Day” in Plymouth. Boston artist Henry Sargent unveiled his painting Landing of the Fathers in 1815. But the first volume of George Bancroft’s widely praised History of the United States (1834) may be the best example of how the Mayflower and Arbella washed ashore and seeded the ground where love of liberty bore its ripest fruit in hubristic orations by the likes of Daniel Webster at well-attended nineteenth-century anniversary celebrations. These efforts were magnified as a result of promotional skills demonstrated by such organizations as the Colonial Dames, who worked to elevate the Mayflower