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

by Nancy Isenberg

During Reconstruction, Republicans designated white trash as a “dangerous class” that was producing a flood of bastards, prostitutes, vagrants, and criminals. They violated every sexual norm, from fathers cohabiting with daughters, to husbands selling wives, to mothers conniving illicit liaisons for daughters. The danger came from a growing population that had stopped disappearing into the wilderness. Reid was appalled by the filthy refugees living in railroad cars, an uncomfortable foreshadowing of twentieth-century trailer trash. John W. De Forest, a bureau agent and yet another novelist, concluded that white trash were tolerable as long as Darwin’s “severe law” of natural selection killed off most of them.17 In 1868, a writer for Putnam’s Magazine told the “history of a family,” tracing a corrupted genealogical tree back to it roots. This one basic story anticipated a host of studies that included The Jukes (1877), which proved the most enduring chronicle of a degenerate lineage, and which influenced Charles Davenport, the leading American eugenicist of the early twentieth century. The author of the 1868 Putnam’s piece claimed to have discovered a real couple, with an actual name—thus going beyond Daniel Hundley’s more general dismissal of southern rubbish as the heirs of indentured servants dumped in the American colonies. One Bill Simmins was the erstwhile progenitor of this corrupt family tree. A British convict and Virginia squatter, he married a London courtesan tu...