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

by Nancy Isenberg

In popular depictions, poor white trash were, above all, “curious” folks whose habits were as “queer” as “any description of Chinese or Indians.” Or, as a New Hampshire schoolteacher observed of clay-eaters in Georgia, the children were prematurely aged. Even at ten years old, “their countenances are stupid and heavy and they often become dropsical and loathsome to sight.” Nothing more dramatically signified a dying breed than the decrepitude of wrinkled and withered children.45 Commentators repeatedly emphasized the odd skin color: “unnatural complexions” of a “ghastly yellowish white,” or as Hundley observed, skin the color of “yellow parchment.” There were “cotton-headed or flaxen-headed” children, whose unhealthy whiteness resembled the albino. There were poor white, dirt-eating urchins who bore a “cadaverous, bloodless look”; their hair, identified as “crops,” took on the appearance of the soil-depleting cotton that surrounded them. The women were a “wretched specimen of maternity” rather than ideal breeders. Nor did they care properly for their offspring. The “tallow-faced gentry,” as one Kansas newspaper disapprovingly labeled them, routinely stuffed their infants’ mouths with clay. The words describing poor white trash had not been quite so pronounced since the seventeenth century.46 “Like breeds like” continued to serve as the guiding principle etched into these damning portraits. Diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, of a wealthy South Carolina family, offered one of the ...