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

by Nancy Isenberg

Trump’s rise was not about class-inflected racism or “whitelash,” he insisted, but served instead to expose liberals’ obsessive need to grant anyone who wanted it membership in a disadvantaged group: black, gay, female, and others. He argued that the Democrats, by their reductionist tendency, had caused “white, rural, religious Americans” to see themselves as ignored, even threatened. The liberal agenda was fueling a hostility toward political correctness; therefore, if the Democratic Party wished to do better, it would have to recover a “pre-identity” politics and reemphasize Americans’ shared values.4 Once again, it was a narrowly defined view of voting, and of identity.

An astute observer wrote in 1924 that American voters preferred to “cherish the unrealities they have absorbed” based upon “the primal instinct to defeat the side they hate or fear.”

This hurling of insults is nineteenth-century political theater revivified. Trump’s tweeting frenzy resembled nothing so much as Andrew Jackson responding to critics by invoking the code duello. Revenge was the Jacksonian recourse in an era when perceived slights led to brawls and shoot-outs. In the fall of 2016, anticipating defeat at the polls, Trump asserted that the election had already been “rigged.” In 1825, Jacksonians similarly attributed their hero’s loss to a “Corrupt Bargain,” because Congress refused to ratify popular opinion. Those who lionized Jackson adored him for his unpolished backcountry manner and uncompromising positions. He has been referred to as a “democratic autocrat.” For the next century or more, he was democracy incarnate.

In spite of the founders’ noble dream of an informed public, the American political landscape has never been able to sustain itself as a place for sound deliberation. Nor does American democracy consistently confer power to a calm problem solver.

Many successful Americans believe they have made it on their own and have little patience for the complaints of those left behind. Trump perceived a world of winners and losers, and many of his supporters want to reinforce the old stigmas that separated the productive worker from the idle. They wanted the boundaries between the unemployed and employed to be firmly enforced, not weakened. “Make America Great Again” is another way of saying that hard work is no longer automatically rewarded as a virtue.

Trump had not only dominated headlines by challenging President Obama to produce his birth certificate, but he also, significantly, questioned his Harvard credentials. Racial pedigree was used to undercut intellectual pedigree.

One thing we can do in the interest of national self-improvement is to further the conversation about the manipulations of class identity by political aspirants, who game the system each time they sell unreal expectations to people whose interests they only pretend to represent.

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. Of course, the intersection of race and class remains an undeniable part of the overall story.

We have seen in recent decades the rise of tribal passions through the rediscovery of “redneck roots,” a proud movement that coursed through the 1980s and 1990s. More than a reaction to progressive changes in race relations, this shift was spurred on by a larger fascination with identity politics. Roots implied that class took on the traits (and allure) of an ethnic heritage, which in turn reflected the modern desire to measure class as merely a cultural phenomenon. But as evidenced in the popularity of the “reality TV” shows Duck Dynasty and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo in recent years, white trash in the twenty-first century remains fraught with the older baggage of stereotypes of the hopelessly ill bred.

The idea of America was presented by its chief promoters with great panache, a vision of how a modern republic might prove itself revolutionary in terms of social mobility in a world dominated by monarchy and fixed aristocracy.

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.

we have the Pilgrims (a people who are celebrated at Thanksgiving, a holiday that did not exist until the Civil War), who came ashore at Plymouth Rock (a place only designated as such in the late eighteenth century). The quintessential American holiday was associated with the native turkey to help promote the struggling poultry industry during the Civil War. The word “Pilgrim” was not even popularized until 1794. 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. (Coerced labor of this kind reminds us of how the majority of white servants came to America.)

That a small fraction of colonists survived the first twenty years of settlement came as no surprise back home—nor did London’s elite much care. The investment was not in people, whose already unrefined habits declined over time, whose rudeness magnified in relation to their brutal encounters with Indians. The colonists were meant to find gold, and to line the pockets of the investor class back in England. The people sent to accomplish this task were by definition expendable.

the poor dregs would be weeded out of English society in four ways. Either nature would reduce the burden of the poor through food shortages, starvation, and disease, or, drawn into crime, they might end up on the gallows. Finally, some would be impressed by force or lured by bounties to fight and die in foreign wars, or else be shipped off to the colonies.

British government gave full encouragement to the slave trade when it granted an African monopoly to the Company of Royal Adventurers in 1663.

Obviously, the Indian occupants were deemed unable to possess a true title. Combing ancient laws for convincing analogies, English colonizers classified the Natives as savages, and sometimes as barbarians. 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.

John Smith embraced the same ideological premise with a precise (if crude) allusion: the Englishman’s right to the land was ensured by his commitment to carpeting the soil with manure. An English elixir of animal waste would magically transform the Virginia wilderness, making untilled wasteland into valuable English territory. Waste was there to be treated, and then exploited. Waste was wealth as yet unrealized.

As he saw it, the larger reward would be reaped in the next generation. By importing raw goods from the New World and exporting cloth and other commodities in return, the poor at home would find work so that “not one poor creature” would feel impelled “to steal, to starve, and beg as they do.”

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

There were few “lusty men” in Virginia, to repeat Hakluyt’s colorful term. It remained difficult to find recruits who would go out and fell trees, build houses, improve the land, fish, and hunt wild game. The men of early Jamestown were predisposed to play cards, to trade with vile sailors, and to rape Indian women.

Jamestown’s founders reproduced no English villages. Instead, they fashioned a ruthless class order.

For Locke was a founding member and third-largest stockholder of the Royal African Company, which secured a monopoly over the British slave trade. His relationship to Carolinian slavery was more than incidental.

Distinct from its neighbors to the north, Georgia experimented with a social order that neither exploited the lower classes nor favored the rich. Its founders deliberately sought to convert the territory into a haven for hardworking families. They aimed to do something completely unprecedented: to build a “free labor” colony.

This was how he came to trust in the power of emulation; he believed that people could be conditioned to do the right thing by observing good leaders.

Proslavery Georgians were not above accusing Oglethorpe of running a prison colony.

In the larger scheme of things, his reform philosophy recognized that weak and desperate men could be led to choose a path that dictated against their own interests.

By 1788, Carolinian Jonathan Bryan was the most powerful man in Georgia, with thirty-two thousand acres and 250 slaves. He set up shop there in 1750, the very year slavery was made legal, and his numerous slaves entitled him to large tracts of lands. But to build his empire he had to pull the strings of Georgia’s Executive Council, whose chief duty was distributing land. A long tenure on the council ensured that he acquired the most fertile land, conveniently situated along major trade routes. By 1760, only 5 percent of white Georgians owned even a single slave, while a handful of families possessed them in the hundreds. Jonathan Bryan was the perfect embodiment of the “Slave Merchants” who Oglethorpe had warned would dominate the colony.

Hereditary titles may have gradually disappeared, but large land grants and land titles remained central to the American system of privilege.

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. 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 better animal instincts.

Instead of a frantic competition over resources, the majority would be perfectly content to occupy a middling stage, what he called a “happy mediocrity.”

ordinarily reserved for freeborn men. His point was that great empires needed large populations (strength came in numbers) in order to people and settle new territories. The incentives that America offered were of a different kind than elsewhere: an abundance of land and the liberty to marry young.

For Franklin, a man of both science and commerce, reproductive labor was work and should be valued as such. By adding to the “numbers of the King’s subjects,” reproductive labor was an imperial asset.

On the other hand, bastards added to the population and increased the wealth of the empire. Franklin’s own circumstances reinforced his view. His son William (later royal governor of New Jersey) was a bastard. William, too, fathered a bastard son, William Temple Franklin, and Temple, as he was known, added two known illegitimate children to the family tree. Bastards were a Franklin family tradition.

Franklin changed the above equation: slavery corrupted all white men, rich and poor alike.

Franklin’s theory of breeding would remain a staple of American exceptionalism for centuries to come. He provided three irresistible arguments. First, he promised that class stability accompanied western migration. Second, he reasoned that the dispersal of people would reduce class conflict and encourage a wider distribution of wealth among the population. Third, what he called a “mediocrity of fortunes” was his belief in the growth of a middle-range class condition. His farming families were not poor or self-sufficient, but engaged in some form of commercial farming, producing enough to support their families and purchase British goods.

The British Empire, with its well-trained ground forces and powerful navy, secured the territory. From that moment forward, the unoccupied land was the lure for settlers much like the molasses pot for the ants. In a land of opportunity, procreating came more naturally, as families felt happy and secure. Rigid class distinctions and the hoarding of resources were less likely to take place. The compression of classes persisted as long as new land was acquired in which people could spread and settle. Industry, frugality, and fertility were the natural outgrowth of a happy mediocrity.

Canada

legal distinction existed between the free and the unfree, the latter including not only slaves but also indentured servants, convict laborers, and apprentices. As dependents, they were all classified as mean, servile, and ill-bred. Thousands of unfree laborers flooded Philadelphia, so that as early as 1730, Franklin was complaining about “vagrants and idle persons” entering the colony. He wrote these words after having escaped impoverished circumstances not many years before.

Ben Franklin the OG NIMBY

Franklin was not a disciple of the “Sermon on the Mount,” but believed instead that the poor were neither less greedy nor naturally humble compared to those above. If the little fish in his world were allowed to rise, they would be just as rapacious.

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 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?”

Paine conceived of America as an experimental society through which to adjust, or recalibrate, the very meaning of empire. Like past commentators, he extolled the natural resources of America: timber, tar, iron, and hemp. Corn and other agricultural goods would give America a leading role in feeding Europe. North America’s major cash crop, tobacco, was starkly missing from his discussion—he used grain-producing Pennsylvania as his model, not Virginia.

The Swedish botanist Carl von Linné, better known to history as Linnaeus, organized all of plant and animal life, and divided Homo sapiens, the word he coined for humans, into four varieties. The European type he said was sanguine, brawny, acute, and inventive; the American Indian he deemed choleric and obstinate, yet free; the Asian was melancholic and greedy; and the African was crafty, indolent, and negligent. This grand (and ethnocentric) taxonomy served Paine’s purpose in justifying the American Revolution. To “begin the world over again,” Americans of English and European descent had to be a new race in the making—perhaps a better one—as they laid claim to North America.

that kings were “made to propagate, to supply the state with an hereditary succession of the breed.”

Farming was arduous work, with limited chance of success, especially for families lacking the resources available to Jefferson: slaves, overseers, draft animals, a plough, nearby mills, and waterways to transport farm produce to market. It was easy to acquire debts, easy to fail. Land alone was no guarantee of self-sufficiency.

Public education accompanied land reforms. In bill no. 79, for the “General Diffusion of Knowledge,” Jefferson laid out a proposal for different levels of preparation: primary schools for all boys and girls, and grammar schools for more capable males at the public expense. For the second tier, he called for twenty young “geniusses” to be drawn from the lower class of each county. Rewarding those with merit, he devised a means of social mobility in a state where education was purely a privilege of wealthy families.

He had a lot to defend in the aftermath of the American Revolution. The war years had taken their toll. A postwar depression created widespread suffering. States had acquired hefty debts, which caused legislatures to increase taxes to levels far higher, sometimes three to four times higher, than before the war. Most of these tax dollars ended up in the hands of speculators in state government securities that had been sold to cover war expenses. Many soldiers were forced to sell their scrip and land bounties to speculators at a fraction of the value. Wealth was being transferred upward, from the tattered pockets of poor farmers and soldiers to the bulging purses of a nouveau riche of wartime speculators and creditors—a new class of “moneyed men.”

Unlike Franklin, Adams felt that the “passion for distinction” was the most powerful driving human force, above hunger and fear. Americans not only scrambled to get ahead; they needed someone to look down on.

Careful breeding was one solution to slavery. In his Revisal of the Laws, Jefferson calculated how a black slave could turn white: once a slave possessed seven-eighths “white” blood, the “taint” of his or her African past was deemed gone. In 1813, he explained to a young Massachusetts lawyer how the formula worked: “It is understood in Natural history that a 4th cross of one race of animals gives an issue of equivalent for all sensible purposes to the original bloods.” This was the same formula Jefferson used in breeding an original stock of merino sheep. William Byrd had earlier talked about blanching Native Americans through intermarriage with Europeans. As Buffon put it, breeding back to the “original” stock meant reconstituting blacks as white people.

towns as Lexington also supported small farmers, who had less security in retaining their land, given the fluctuations