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

by Nancy Isenberg

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Nevertheless, the “first” Thanksgiving has been given a date of 1621, when well-meaning Pilgrims and fair-minded Wampanoags shared a meal. The master of ceremonies was their Indian interpreter, Squanto, who had helped the English survive a difficult winter. Left out of this story is the detail (not so minor) that Squanto only knew English because he had been kidnapped and sold as a slave to an English ship’s captain.

Colonies ought to be Emunctories or Sinkes of States; to drayne away the filth. —John White, The Planters Plea (1630)

This powerful conception of land use would play a key role in future categorizations of race and class on the experimental continent. Before they even established new and busy societies, colonizers denoted some people as entrepreneurial stewards of the exploitable land; they declared others (the vast majority) as mere occupiers, a people with no measurable investment in productivity or in commerce.

Each time war revived, the poor were drummed back into service, becoming what one scholar has called a “reserve army of the unemployed.”

Their destiny, once these same folk were “bred up” as soldiers and sailors, was to fill out a colonial reserve army of waste men, to be sent to die in England’s wars.

For slave women, fertile capacity made the womb an article of commerce and slave children chattel—movable property, like cattle. (The word “chattel” comes from the same Latin root as “cattle.”)

Populated by what many dismissed as “useless lubbers” (conjuring the image of sleepy and oafish men lolling about doing nothing), North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony.

In British tradition, the American elite expected the lower classes to fight their wars. In the Seven Years’ War, for example, Virginians used the infamous practice of impressment to round up vagabonds to meet quotas. During the Revolution, General Washington stated that only “the lower class of people” should serve as foot soldiers.

Both crackers and squatters—two terms that became shorthand for landless migrants—supposedly stayed just one step ahead of the “real” farmers, Jefferson’s idealized, commercially oriented cultivators. They lived off the grid, rarely attended a school or joined a church, and remained a potent symbol of poverty. To be lower class in rural America was to be one of the landless. They disappeared into unsettled territory and squatted down (occupied tracts without possessing a land title) anywhere and everywhere.

“Squatter,” in one 1815 dictionary, was a “cant name” among New Englanders for a person who illegally occupied land he did not own.

“Crackers” first appeared in the records of British officials in the 1760s and described a population with nearly identical traits.

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 Another significant linguistic connection to the popular term was the adjective “crack brained,” which denoted a crazy person and was the English slang for a fool or “idle head.”

In Rush’s regional sketch, squatters from the northern states seemed to turn into crackers as soon as they crossed into the southern backcountry.

In new trans-Appalachian towns such as Lexington, Kentucky, dubbed the “Athens of the West,” with the addition of roads came commercial growth between 1815 and 1827, so that a new merchant middle class took root. Such towns as Lexington also supported small farmers, who had less security in retaining their land, given the fluctuations in the market, while artisans of the meaner sort hung about the town.

The ubiquity of squatters across the United States turned them into a powerful political trope. They came to be associated with 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 even with such unappealing traits, the squatter also acquired some favorable qualities: the simple backwoodsman welcomed strangers into his cabin, the outrageous storyteller entertained them through the night. Squatters, then, were more than troublesome, uncouth rascals taking up land they didn’t own. This double identity made the squatter a contested figure. By the 1830s and 1840s, he was fully a symbol of partisan politics, celebrated as the iconic common man who came to epitomize Jacksonian democracy.

Though “white trash” appeared in print as early as 1821, the designation gained widespread popularity in the 1850s.

critics charged that poor whites had fallen below African slaves on the scale of humanity. They marked an evolutionary decline, and they foretold a dire future for the Old South. If free whites produced feeble children, how could a robust democracy thrive? If whiteness was not an automatic badge of superiority, a guarantee of the homogeneous population of independent, educable freemen, as Jefferson imagined, then the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were unobtainable.

James Henry Hammond, South Carolina’s leading proslavery intellectual, coined the term “mudsill” to describe the essential inferiority of the North’s socioeconomic system.

Female rioters were, in this way, the equivalent of male deserters. They shattered the illusion of Confederate unity and shared sacrifice. In 1863, in the wake of the Richmond riot, Vanity Fair exposed the persistence of deep class divisions among the southern population. The pro-Union magazine published a provocative image with the article, “Pity the Poor Rebels.” It described how poor men were arbitrarily rounded up as conscripts, while the desperately poor “white trash” of the Confederacy scratched the words “WE ARE STARVING” over the “dead wall” that separated the North and South.

Wars in general, and civil wars to a greater degree, have the effect of exacerbating class tensions, because the sacrifices of war are always distributed unequally, and the poor are hit hardest. North and South had staked so much on their class-based definitions of nationhood that it is no exaggeration to say that in the grand scheme of things, Union and Confederate leaders saw the war as a clash of class systems wherein the superior civilization would reign triumphant.

Darwin’s best-known works, On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), scored big in America, as did the work of his cousin Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics.

During Reconstruction, Republicans designated white trash as a “dangerous class” that was producing a flood of bastards, prostitutes, vagrants, and criminals.

Chief Justice Joseph Brown of the Supreme Court of Georgia issued a monumental decision. The former rebel governor ruled that the courts had the right to dissolve all interracial marriages. “Amalgamation” was classed with incestuous unions and marriages between idiots, which the state already proscribed.

Because children produced by unfit parents could cost taxpayers if they became criminals, society had the right to protect itself. Far more dangerous was the cost to the nation’s human stock if degenerates were allowed to breed. In 1913, Roosevelt wrote supportively to the leading eugenicist Charles Davenport that it was the patriotic duty of every good citizen of superior stock to leave his or her “blood behind.” Degenerates, he warned, must not be permitted to “reproduce their kind.”

The fear of promiscuous poor women led eugenics reformers to push for the construction of additional asylums to house feebleminded white women. In this effort, they deployed the term “segregation,” the same as was used by southerners to enforce white-black separation. The “passing” female was not a new trope either: it borrowed from the other southern fear of the passing mulatto, who might marry into a prominent family. Passing also conjured the old English fears of the class interloper and unregulated social mobility—the house servant seducing the lord of the manor.

Even with such racial overtones, the major target of eugenicists was the poor white woman.

In a culture under siege, white trash meant impure, and not quite white.

The entire tenant system operated by coercion and dependence. Landowners did not want their tenants to improve, because then they would have less control over them. A hungry worker was the best worker, or so many southern cotton growers believed.

Sounding a lot like the critics in our present who deplore the concentration of wealth among the top 1 percent of Americans, Wallace in 1936 argued that liberty was impossible if “36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.”

The willingness of Americans to tolerate waste was the real cause of human erosion. It reflected the larger social problem of devaluing human labor and human worth.

Southern politicians shortchanged rural Americans in another crucial way: they made sure that the New Deal’s signature Social Security program excluded farm laborers.

There was a method to Agee’s madness. In this strangely introspective, deeply disturbing narrative, the author tries to force readers to look beyond conventional ways of seeing the poor. Instead of blaming them, he asks his audience to acknowledge their own complicity. The poor are not dull or slow-witted, he insists; they have merely internalized a kind of “anesthesia,” which numbs them against the “shame and insult of discomforts, insecurities, and inferiorities.”

unless these people were lifted up, “they will pull the rest of the Nation down.”

It was the southern war camps that set the tone, but after the war “trailer trash” became a generic term, no longer regionally specific.

The FHA did not get around to insuring mortgages for mobile homes until 1971, so until then, even though trailers were cheaper, owners faced other hidden costs and penalties.

In private, though, Johnson was not always kind to poor rural whites. He had this to say about white trash on driving through Tennessee and seeing a group of “homely” women holding up racist signs: “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Like the Nobel Prize–winning writer William Faulkner, LBJ knew about the debilitating nature of false poor white pride. As president, he never lost sight of how central class and race were to the fractured culture of the South.

Personal connections, favoritism, and trading on class-based knowledge still grease the wheels that power social mobility in today’s professional and business worlds.

In 2009, the 1 percent paid 5.2 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while the poorest 20 percent paid 10.9 percent.

Ironically, given the American Revolutionaries’ hatred for Old World aristocracies, Americans transfer wealth today in the fashion of those older societies, while modern European nations provide considerably more social services to their populations.