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Campaigns have long relied on shallow ploys and vicious rhetoric.
class is as American as it ever was British.
Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system.
economic stratification created by wealth and privilege.
reducing poverty back in England, and the other called for transporting the idle and unproductive to the New World.
imagined America not as an Eden of opportunity but as a giant rubbish heap that could be transformed into productive terrain.
The quintessential American holiday was associated with the native turkey to help promote the struggling poultry industry during the Civil War. The word “Pilgrim” was not even popularized until 1794. Nevertheless, the “first” Thanksgiving has been given a date of 1621, when well-meaning
Here was England’s opportunity to thin out its prisons and siphon off thousands; here was an outlet for the unwanted, a way to remove vagrants and beggars, to be rid of London’s eyesore population. Those sent on the hazardous voyage to America who survived presented a simple purpose for imperial profiteers: to serve English interests and perish in the process. In
By the 1630s, New Englanders reinvented a hierarchical society of “stations,”
The elites owned Indian and African slaves, but the population they most exploited were their child laborers. Even the church reflected class relations: designated seating affirmed class station.
The colonists were meant to find gold, and to line the pockets of the investor class back in England. The people sent to accomplish this task were by definition expendable.15
In British law, ownership was measured by standing one’s ground—that is, holding and occupying the land.
The English subscribed to the idea that the poor dregs would be weeded out of English society in four ways. Either nature would reduce the burden of the poor through food shortages, starvation, and disease, or, drawn into crime, they might end up on the gallows. Finally, some would be impressed by force or lured by bounties to fight and die in foreign wars, or else be shipped off to the colonies. Such worthless drones as these could be removed to colonial outposts that were in short supply of able-bodied laborers and, lest we forget, young “fruitful” females. Once there, it was hoped, the
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Still others ventured to America to leave tarnished reputations and economic failures behind.
Independence did not magically erase the British class system, nor did it root out long-entrenched beliefs about poverty and the willful exploitation of human labor. An unfavored population, widely thought of as waste or “rubbish,” remained disposable indeed well into modern times.
Wasteland meant undeveloped land, land that was outside the circulation of commercial exchange and apart from the understood rules of agricultural production.
He pictured paupers, vagabonds, convicts, debtors, and lusty young men without employment doing all such work.
But the bulk of the labor force was to come from the swelling numbers of poor and homeless.
widespread vilification of the poor.
Each time war revived, the poor were drummed back into service, becoming what one scholar has called a “reserve army of the unemployed.”
stealing vegetables and blasphemy were punishable by death.
exploiting a vulnerable, dependent workforce. 31
Sexual satisfaction and heirs to provide for would make slothful men into more productive colonists.
the government they abided by, after all, imitated English county oligarchies in which the landed elite monopolized government offices.
Widows were obvious conduits of wealth and land, and with high mortality rates prevailing throughout the seventeenth century, those who survived rampant disease would likely have married two or three times.
Slavery was thus a logical outgrowth of the colonial class system imagined by Hakluyt. It emerged from three interrelated phenomena: harsh labor conditions, the treatment of indentures as commodities, and, most of all, the deliberate choice to breed children so that they should become an exploitable pool of workers.
Leet-men represented Locke’s awkward solution to rural poverty.
the word “Leet-men,” which in England at this time meant something very different: unemployed men entitled to poor relief.
both alcohol and dark-skinned people were prohibited. “No slavery is allowed, nor negroes,” Moore wrote. As a sanctuary for “free white people,” Georgia “would not permit slaves, for slaves starve the poor laborer.”
He saw how slavery had sparked discontent among poor whites in Virginia, who routinely refused to “dirty their hands with Labour of any kind,” preferring to steal or starve rather than work in the fields. Slavery ruined the “industry of our White People,” he confessed, for they saw a “Rank of Poor Creatures below them,” and detested the thought of work out of a perverse pride, lest they might “look like slaves.”
the unmarried man of means was a scandalous figure. He was ridiculed as a hermaphrodite, as half man, half woman; his prescribed punishment, as one New York newspaper demanded, should be to have half of his beard shaved from his face to indicate his diminished manliness.
In short, he concluded that slavery made Englishmen idle and impotent.12
expressing a natural discomfort with unrestrained social mobility.
Not only were the “ignorant and unfit” routinely elevated to kings, so were ennobled infants, as yet lacking
convict laborers, servants, apprentices, working poor, and families living in miserable wilderness cabins
In British tradition, the American elite expected the lower classes to fight their wars.
wanted Americans tied to the land, with deep roots to their offspring, to future generations.
the “passion for distinction” was the most powerful driving human force, above hunger and fear. Americans not only scrambled to get ahead; they needed someone to look down on. “There
Jefferson calculated how a black slave could turn white: once a slave possessed seven-eighths “white” blood, the “taint” of his or her African past was deemed gone. In
Both “squatter” and “cracker” were Americanisms, terms that updated inherited English notions of idleness and vagrancy.
The origin of “cracker” is no less curious than “squatter.” The “cracking traders” of the 1760s were described as noisy braggarts, prone to lying and vulgarity. One could also “crack” a jest, and crude Englishmen “cracked” wind. Firecrackers gave off a stench and were loud and disruptive as they snapped, crackled, and popped. A “louse cracker” referred to a lice-ridden, slovenly, nasty fellow.13
five traits: (1) crude habitations; (2) boastful vocabulary; (3) distrust of civilization and city folk; (4) an instinctive love of liberty (read: licentiousness); and (5) degenerate patterns of breeding. Yet
It amazed him that such uninspired beings could find anything to boast about, yet they proudly spoke of America as the land of opportunity.24
westerner’s “rude instinct of masculine liberty.”
it was not the United States, but Liberia, a country founded by the British and former American slaves, that first established universal suffrage for adult men,
Though “white trash” appeared in print as early as 1821, the designation gained widespread popularity in the 1850s. The shift seemed evident in 1845 when a newspaper reported
poor whites as a degenerate class, prone to crime, immorality, and ignorance.
The Texas national constitution explicitly denied citizenship to those of African or Indian descent. The Texas legislature passed its first antimiscegenation law in 1837.
Both of these extensive territories were overrun with runaway debtors, criminal outcasts, rogue gamblers, and ruthless adventurers who thrived in the chaotic atmosphere of western sprawl.
California reverted to older British colonial patterns. Though it entered the Union as a free state, prohibiting slavery, the legislature soon passed a series of byzantine laws permitting the indentured servitude of Native Americans. Between 1850 and 1854, nearly twenty thousand Indian men, women, and children were exploited as bound servants.
