White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

by Nancy Isenberg

promoters imagined America not as an Eden of opportunity but as a giant rubbish heap that could be transformed into productive terrain.

North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony.

Unlike others before him, Oglethorpe felt the disadvantaged could be reclaimed if they were given a fair chance.

Franklin certainly never endorsed social mobility as we think of it today, despite his own experience.

Paine conceived of America as an experimental society through which to adjust, or recalibrate, the very meaning of empire.

he had reduced the New World to one giant and nefarious Dismal Swamp. All of America, as it were, had become North Carolina.

They were “no better than savages,” he wrote, “their children brought up in the Woods like brutes, without any notion of Religion, [or] Government.” Nothing man could devise “improved the breed.”9

Defending Jackson seemed to require threats that celebrated physical prowess over mental agility.

For many others like Houston, Texas independence was an epochal achievement; it symbolized the passage of the “scepter” from the Old to the New World, the purest flowering of the Anglo-Saxon race.13 Houston was actually a strange choice to carry this banner of racial pride. Between 1829 and 1833, before he became president, he lived with the Cherokees, took two Indian wives, and sat for a portrait in full Indian garb.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW

William Gregg, who considered training poor white trash for factory labor.

Tweet seen earlier

leaving poor farmers and hired laborers the major target of the draft. Next the draft was extended to the age of forty-five, and by 1864 all males from seventeen to fifty were subject to conscription.17

A community in Mississippi seceded from the Confederacy, creating the “Free State of Jones” in the middle of a swamp; it was, quite literally, a white trash Union sanctuary in President Davis’s home state.32

the pledge of allegiance ???

A writer for the Atlantic Monthly asked: why should government “disfranchise the humble, quiet, hardworking negro” and leave the North vulnerable to the vote of the “worthless barbarian”—the “ignorant, illiterate, and vicious” poor white?15

Johnson’s veto message said that freedmen lacked something naturally endowed: fitness. Finally, the president made clear that he disapproved of any law that sanctioned interracial marriage.22

They were the sort of people that lynch Negroes, that mistake hoodlumism for wit, and cunning for intelligence, that attend revivals and fight and fornicate in the bushes afterwards. They were undiluted Anglo-Saxons. They were the sovereign voter. It was so horrible it seemed unreal.

reminds you of trump supporters today a little bit...

“Society must look upon germ-plasm as belonging to society and not merely to the individual who carries it.”

interesting view of procreation

By 1931, twenty-seven states had sterilization laws on the books,

“aristogenic”—what

Poor whites were inexpensive and expendable, and found their lot comparable to suffering African Americans when it came to the justice system.

Nothing proves the point better than the fact that both black and white convicts were referred to as “niggers.”3

States raked in tremendous revenues by leasing prisoners to private businesses.

Manual laborers deserved the same respect as heroes on the battlefield.

Little Rock was the most important domestic news story of 1957.

“demagogic

Good word