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

by Nancy Isenberg

Bolles claimed that the poor who were under the agency’s supervision were willing to “crawl” into the “impersonal lap” of government dependency. They were all deluded and undeserving—the litany will sound familiar: “hillbilly clay-eaters,” “hoe-wielders” (backward tenant farmers looking for a handout), “urban poor who see success in green pastures,” and, last but not least, “desert-dwelling Indians.” Each of these was presumed a breed of men with nowhere to go.36 Again and again, enemies of the New Deal railed against the royalist bureaucrat “Rex” Tugwell. He continued to infuriate opposing congressmen by dismissing their logic and defending government patronage with the line “nothing is too good for these people.” Tugwell had no patience for the illusion of democracy, or the pretense of being a man of the people, or the empty rhetoric of equal opportunity. An urbane “voice in the wilderness,” he boldly challenged the credibility of the old, illusive belief that America’s class boundaries were porous and that hard work was all it took to succeed.37 Tugwell’s class argument was simple. He summed up his views in a 1934 speech in Kansas City when he said that the old standby refrain of “rugged individualism” really meant “the regimentation of the many for the benefit of the few.” The New Deal’s mission was to make individualism available to those ordinarily deprived of it, freeing the many from their virtual imprisonment at the hands of the few.

The more I hear from and about this guy, the more I like him.