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

by Nancy Isenberg

Americans have a taste for a “democracy of manners,” which is different from real democracy. Voters accept huge disparities in wealth, while expecting their elected leaders to appear to be no different from the rest of us.

Interesting.

“Wide and equitable distribution of wealth is essential to a nation’s prosperous growth and intellectual development. And that distribution is brought about by the labor union more than any other agency of our civilization.”

Trump seemed to want it both ways—a man of means and glamour and a man of the people; on the first front, though, he was a most ironic example of urban sophistication.

He made the people buy this and that is amazing.

His bragging ways first led him into TV camp as an occasional player in WrestleMania, before going on to star in The Apprentice. None of this activity (or its contradictions) bothered his working-class voters. Just the opposite: it forged a bond. Every time he spoke, he rejected PC etiquette. He was “one of them.”10

Optics matter.

Said Shoe on Head.

Clinton Democrats Trump Republicans Pedigreed Elites Disinherited Urban Insider Rural Outsider Cosmopolitan Provincial Professionals Working Stiffs Meritocracy Hard Work Faith in Upward Mobility Fear of Losing Class Status

Both Trump at his inaugural and President Obama in his farewell remarks called for solidarity, but their visions of what constitutes togetherness are completely at odds.

Democrats, in general, endorse the liberal ideal of meritocracy, in which talent is rewarded through the acquisition of earned academic credentials. Yet this dream is not possible for all Americans. Only 32.5 percent of Americans today graduate college, which means that the majority does not imagine this path up the social ladder as its ticket to success.

I bought into this.

Punditry has tended to reduce the reality of class, which crosses lines of racial and gender identity, and to replace it with an all-encompassing marker of dispossession that exclusively features the once ascendant, now aggrieved “white working-class male.”

Agreed.

politicians are said to appeal to one or another preset group. We need to see beyond.

We need to stop thinking that some Americans are the real Americans, the deserving, the talented, the most patriotic and hardworking, while others can be dismissed as less deserving of the American dream.

Amen.

Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity.

Saved for later.

At all times, white trash remind us of one of the American nation’s uncomfortable truths: the poor are always with us.

A preoccupation with penalizing poor whites reveals an uneasy tension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises—the dream of upward mobility—and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unobtainable.

For much of American history, the worst classes were seen as extrusions of the worst land: scrubby, barren, and swampy wasteland. Home ownership remains today the measure of social mobility.

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.

Wow!

How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or indeed accommodate, its persistently marginalized people?

Great quote!

An imaginary classless (or class-free) American past is the America that Charles Murray has conjured in his book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (2012).

For Murray, an authority in the minds of many, the large and fluid society of 1963 was held together by the shared experiences of the nuclear family.

Parody was one way Americans safely digested their class politics.

A past that relies exclusively on the storied Pilgrims, or the sainted generation of 1776, shortchanges us in more ways than one. We miss a crucial historical competition between northern and southern founding narratives and their distinctive parables minimizing the importance of class.

And so the great American saga, as taught, excludes the very pertinent fact that after the 1630s, less than half came to Massachusetts for religious reasons.

Saved for Peyton.

we have the Pilgrims (a people who are celebrated at Thanksgiving, a holiday that did not exist until the Civil War),

I didn't know this.

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.

Fuck slavery!

Here was England’s opportunity to thin out its prisons and siphon off thousands; here was an outlet for the unwanted, a way to remove vagrants and beggars, to be rid of London’s eyesore population.

During the 1600s, far from being ranked as valued British subjects, the great majority of early colonists were classified as surplus population and expendable “rubbish,” a rude rather than robust population.

Hey Oli!

Land was the principal source of wealth, and those without any had little chance to escape servitude. It was the stigma of landlessness that would leave its mark on white trash from this day forward.

Own land!

The year 1776 is a false starting point for any consideration of American conditions.

The Indians did not build what the English would acknowledge as permanent homes and towns; they did not enclose the workable ground inside hedges and fences. Under their tenancy, the land appeared unbounded and untamed—what John Smith, in his accounts of Virginia, and later New England, described as “very ranke” and weedy. The Indians lived off the earth as passive nomads. Profit-seeking planters and industrious husbandmen, on the other hand, were needed to cultivate the ground for its riches, and in doing so impose a firm hand.7

Waste was wealth as yet unrealized.

It was not just land that could be waste. People could be waste too.

At the heart of the Jamestown system was the indentured contract that made laborers disposable property. In so harsh an environment, survival was difficult, and the unappreciated waste people were literally worked to death.

When Winthrop defended the colony, he wanted to create a religious community that would be saved from the “corrupted” bastions of learning, Oxford and Cambridge.

Thus the Puritan family was at no time the modern American nuclear family, or anything close. It was often composed of children of different parents, because one or another parent was likely to die young, making remarriage quite common.

Fertility was greatly prized in colonial America. Good male custodians were needed to husband the land’s wealth. Widows were expected to quickly remarry so that their land did not go to waste.

In a law passed in 1662, a slave was defined not only by place of origin, or as a heathen, but also for being born to an enslaved woman.

The 1662 Virginia law could as easily have been based on a breeder’s model: the calves of the cow were the property of the owner, even if the male bull belonged to someone else.73

womb an article of commerce and slave children chattel—movable property, like cattle.

Wow!

The majority of those who landed on American shores did not live long enough to own land, let alone to master it.

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

He mused that colonization would have had a better outcome if male settlers had been encouraged to intermarry with Indian women. Over two generations, the Indian stock would have improved, as a species of flower or tree might; dark skin blanched white, heathen ways dimmed.

Explorers, amateur scientists, and early ethnologists like William Byrd all assumed—and unabashedly professed—that inferior or mismanaged lands bred inferior, ungovernable people.

if slaves were encouraged to “breed like animals,” then poor whites could not reproduce at the same rate and hold on to their land or their freedom.

It was already apparent that slavery and class identity were intertwined.

What had been considered “peculiar” about Georgia—the banning of slavery—would ironically come to mean the precise opposite when in the nineteenth century slavery became the “peculiar institution” of the American South.

Hereditary titles may have gradually disappeared, but large land grants and land titles remained central to the American system of privilege. When it came to common impressions of the despised lower class, the New World was not new at all.

Like every educated Englishman, Benjamin Franklin was obsessed with idleness. In his Poor Richard’s Almanack of 1741, he offered familiar advice that echoed the talk of Hakluyt, Winthrop, and Byrd: “Up sluggard, and waste not life; in the grave will be sleeping enough.”

It was an article of faith in eighteenth-century British thought that civilized societies usually formed out of the fundamental human need for security to ensure survival, but the same societies were gradually corrupted by a preoccupation with luxuries, which resulted in decadence.

Noted for later.

The rise and fall of the Roman Empire stood behind such theorizing; what Franklin did was to shift the focus to human biology. Underneath all human endeavors were gut-level animal instincts—and foremost for Franklin was the push and pull of pain and pleasure. Too much pleasure produced a decadent society; too much pain led to tyranny and oppression.

Somewhere in between was a happy medium, a society that channeled humanity’s b...