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

by Nancy Isenberg

Franklin certainly never endorsed social mobility as we think of it today, despite his own experience. To be accurate, he fantasized that the continent would flatten out classes, but it was clear that this condition was contingent upon keeping poor people in perpetual motion. Franklin’s militia plan expressed a conservative impulse. Giving the accomplished middling sort a feeling of public respect and a sense of civic duty would yield them the solid contentment of happy mediocrity. Contentment might actually reduce the desire of more ambitious men to rise up the social ladder too quickly or recklessly. Franklin understood that maintaining class differences had its own appeal. In the Pennsylvania Gazette, the newspaper he edited, an article was published in 1741 that exposed why people preferred having a class hierarchy to having none. Hierarchy was easily maintained when the majority felt there was someone below them. “How many,” the author asked, “even of the better sort,” would choose to be “Slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and Tyrannical Rule over all below them?” There was something desirable, perhaps even pleasurable, to use Franklin’s utilitarian axiom, in the feeling of lording over subordinate classes. To alter that measure of satisfaction required a drastic rewiring of the eighteenth-century mind. Again, for Franklin, the solution lay in a radical process of spreading people so far apart and in such sparsely settled territory t...