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December 25, 2019 - January 20, 2020
time. Future eugenic policies built upon his blueprint for filtering out bad seeds from America’s human breeding stock.
The American settlers who had arrived before independence were encouraged by the Mexican government to marry local Tejano women;
Why? How did this benefit the Mexican government?
racial class and caste system,
Pure Castilian Spanish families > Creoles born in New World with up to 1/8 Indian blood > Mestizos, Indians, Africans
James Buchanan
The only Pennsylvanian president was one of the worst presidents.
California reverted to older British colonial patterns.
It was John Smith’s Jamestown all over again,
1852. San Francisco quickly became the most cosmopolitan hub
Helper easily transferred his perspective on California miners to the southern poor. The gold diggers were an updated version of squatters:
For Helper, economies dependent on one source of wealth created extreme class conditions.
Free Soil rhetoric fed the belief that freemen could not coexist with slaves—just
Another echo of "Blood and soil"
as early as 1843, poor southern whites were being forced from their homes, and pushed into exile like refugees, because they were unable to compete with those Helper called slaveowning “land-sharks.”
Free soil revived the fight between squatters and speculators, and converted squatters into honest freemen of a “landed democracy” who stood proud against a slaveholding oligarchy.32
Henry David Thoreau took the same theme to its darkest corner of the imagination: the slave South was a rotting corpse, he wrote, and should at best be used to “manure” the colonizing West. Equating poor whites with human detritus, he described a people whose only function was to act as fertilizer for the territories.
Was unaware of this side of Thoreau
only the free white children of the founding generation were heirs to the original agreement; only pedigree could determine who inherited American citizenship and whose racial lineage warranted entitlement and the designation “freeman.”
Dred Scott decision
on the path to disunion, the roadside was strewn with white trash.
Wars are battles of words, not just bullets.
We tend to forget that an estimated three hundred thousand white southerners, many from the border states, fought for the Union side,
he observed that two distinct labor systems coexisted in the United States. In the South, the line between classes was drawn on the basis of “color,” while in the North the boundary had been marked “by property, between the rich and poor.”
Jefferson Davis 1851
“mudsill”
class angst suffused Confederate thinking and served to unite southern elites.
by 1864 all males from seventeen to fifty were subject to conscription.
Confederate soldiers saw themselves as a superior people.
Slaves were content in their menial lot, many believed. In this strange reversal of the American dream, the South’s superiority arose, then, most ironically, from its absence of class mobility.
Sick.
Men were arrested, and some hanged, for peddling his book.
Helper’s Impending Crisis of the South
southern whites lagged behind northerners in literacy rates by at least a six-to-one margin.
Fear of dropping to the level of slaves would lead poor whites to fight.
granted exemptions to planters with twenty or more slaves.
A community in Mississippi seceded from the Confederacy, creating the “Free State of Jones” in the middle of a swamp; it was, quite literally, a white trash Union sanctuary in President Davis’s home state.
among average soldiers there was little evidence of a deep attachment to the Confederacy.
the rich hoarded scarce supplies along with food.
For Garfield, and for many others, the mudsills were the backbone of the Union.
ironic symbol of class rage.
Johnson, an old guard Jacksonian Democrat, felt no constraint in voicing his disgust with the bloated planter elite.
Frequently vulgar, criticized as low class. Was a tailor.
Union leaders believed that only widespread humiliation and suffering would end the war.
“usufruct.”
No absolute right to private property.
His philosophy not only rejected states’ rights, but equated treason with a return to the state of nature.
I dont understand the part about treason???
The North’s mudsills seemed like royalty compared to the South’s truly mud-bespattered swamp people.
To convince themselves of easy victory, Confederates insisted that the Federal army was filled with the “trash” of Europe,
North and South each saw class as the enemy’s pivotal weakness and a source of military and political vulnerability.
the sacrifices of war are always distributed unequally, and the poor are hit hardest.
Steve Earle:
I volunteered for the Army on my birthday
They draft the white trash first, 'round here anyway
Little separated northern mudsills from southern trash. Neither class gained much when reduced to cannon fodder.56
if one accepted the racist assumption that blacks are of “inferior stock,” then it was pointless to “legislate against nature”; proving the supremacy of the white race needed no help from politicians, because any form of philanthropy would be “powerless against deficient cerebral development.”
By refusing to hold up the mirror to themselves, Du Bois contended, southern whites were failing to see their own degeneracy.3
southern politics had set the stage for the dual appeal of Darwinism and the eugenics movement.
So let us call the Johnson plan what it would have been if actually undertaken: a white trash republic.
although “poor white trash” had proven themselves incapable of doing anything before the war, they had suddenly discovered a trade in “the refugee business,” by which he meant living off government handouts.
black freedmen had made great progress, were “more settled, industrious and ambitious” as a result of federal intervention, and eager to achieve literacy with “honest pride and manly integrity,” the same could not be said of that “pitiable class of poor whites,” the “only class which seem almost unaffected by the [bureau’s] great benevolence and its bold reform.”
he distinguished between “mean whites” and “common whites,” arguing
should government “disfranchise the humble, quiet, hardworking negro” and leave the North vulnerable to the vote of the “worthless barbarian”—the “ignorant, illiterate, and vicious” poor white?
Hardworking blacks were suddenly the redeemed ones, while white trash remained undeveloped, evolutionarily stagnant creatures.
